1NC
Embargo limits drilling now – plan unlocks large-scale Cuban production.
Padgett 08 Tim Padgett joined TIME in 1996 as Mexico City bureau chief covering Latin America. In 1999 he moved to
Florida to become TIME’s Miami & Latin America bureau chief, reporting on the hemisphere from Tallahassee to Tierra del Fuego.
He has chronicled Mexico’s democratization and drug war as well as the rise of Latin leaders like Lula and Hugo Chavez, “How
Cuba’s Oil Find Could Change the US Embargo”¶ Time Magazine – Oct. 23, 2008 – internally quoting Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado,
a Cuba oil analyst at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,¶ 1853252,00.html#ixzz13Li5cosN
The Spanish energy company Repsol-YPF has entered into a production-sharing agreement with Cupet and is
scheduled to start drilling the first real well in the EEZ next year. Other international firms, including Norway's
StatoilHidro and India's Oil & Natural Gas Corp., are part of the Repsol-led consortium. Venezuela's state-run Petroleos de
Venezuela is considered a lesser player because it has little deep-water drilling experience. (China is also interested but so far only
involved in onshore drilling in Cuba.) Cuba is now in important negotiations with Brazil's Petrobras, which just made its own
multibillion-barrel oil find off its coast near Rio de Janeiro and could, analysts say, be the major offshore drilling partner for Cuba if
it jumps in.¶ Still,
the concessions so far represent less than a quarter of the 59 drilling blocks
that Cuba hopes to exploit in the 43,000-sq.-mi. (112,000 sq km) EEZ. Analysts say one reason is the daunting
infrastructural difficulties facing any company that drills in Cuba: firms have to bring much
more of their own capital, equipment, technology and on-the-ground know-how than usual. This
year's severe hurricane damage in Cuba has made the situation worse. Canada's Sherritt, in fact, recently dropped out of its fourblock contract. "Who else is going to be willing to actually come in and take the risk in Cuba?" says
Benjamin-Alvarado. "In
terms of proximity and technology, the only people really able to do it to
the extent the Cubans need are the Americans."
That trades-off with US- Mid-East oil ties.
Alhaiji and Maris ‘4
[Dr. A. F. Alhajji is an energy economist and George Patton Chair of Business and Economics at the College of Business
Administration at Ohio Northern, Terry L. Maris is the founding executive director of the Center for Cuban. Business Studies and
professor of management, “The Future of Cuba’s Energy Sector,” Cuba Today, 2004,
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/bildn/publications/cubatodaybookcomplete.pdf#page=105]
The current economic, political, and social trends in Cuba indicate that¶ energy consumption
will increase substantially in the future. Transition to a¶ market economy would accelerate this trend. In this article
the word “transition”¶ refers to any movement towards a market economy. It does not necessarily¶ mean regime change.¶ The
proximity of Cuba to the United States and the possibility of massive¶ oil deposits in Cuban
waters will have a tangible impact on political, economic,¶ and social environments, not only in
Cuba, but in the whole region.¶ The discovery of commercial deposits of oil would affect Cuba’s
economy on¶ one hand and US energy policy and energy security on the other. If US-Cuba¶ relations improve in the
future, discovery of large oil deposits could affect the¶ energy trade patterns between the two
countries and affect oil trade between¶ the US and other oil producing countries, especially in
the Middle East.
That causes Saudi Prolif.
Guzansky ’13 Yoel Guzansky is a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University. His main research
area is Gulf security. He has also served as Iran coordinator at Israel's National Security Council. His recent publications include The
Gulf States in a Changing Strategic Environment (2012), One Year of the Arab Spring: Global and Regional Implications, and The
Gulf States: Between Iran and the West – Middle East Quarterly¶ Spring 2013, pp. 59-64 – available at:
http://www.meforum.org/3512/saudi-arabia-pakistan-nuclear-weapon
The United States is still Saudi Arabia's most effective security support, but if Washington
distances itself from regional matters, the gradual entrance of new players into the Gulf is
inevitable.¶ The question of Saudi acquisition of a nuclear deterrent is more relevant than ever when both enemies and friends
of the United States are looking at a possible regional drawdown on Washington's part as well as a lack of support for the proWestern regimes that remain in place. If the U.S. government provides Riyadh with formal security guarantees, it would be natural
for it to demand that the kingdom forego its strategic goals. But Riyadh's
inclusion under a U.S. defense
umbrella is not a given and depends both on the quality of relations between the
two countries and other Saudi considerations. Riyadh remains skeptical over Washington's willingness to
come to its aid and may thus seek to purchase a nuclear deterrent, which would provide it with more
freedom vis-à-vis its stronger ally. Under present circumstances, it is not unreasonable for Riyadh to rely on other states for its
defense in addition to Washington for the simple reason that it has done so in the past. Likewise, it is more than likely that the
Saudis will not act transparently because they have acted in secret previously.¶ After
Iran, Saudi Arabia is the
number one candidate for further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Open
source evidence remains circumstantial, but perhaps more than any other regional player, Riyadh has the requisite
ideological and strategic motives as well as the financial wherewithal to act on the option. ¶ The
kingdom may conclude that its security constraints as well as the attendant prestige and influence generated by having a bomb
outweigh the political and economic costs it will pay. The difficulty in stopping Tehran's dogged quest for a nuclear capability
doubts about the reliability of Washington is liable to encourage
Riyadh to shorten timetables for developing an independent nuclear infrastructure, as well as to opt
to purchase a turnkey nuclear system, an off-the-shelf product, or to enter into a security compact of one sort
with another power. Sunni-majority Pakistan has emerged as the natural candidate for such an
arrangement.¶ Heavy U.S. pressure is likely to be brought to bear on the Saudis not to acquire nuclear capabilities. Indeed, it
seems that, at present , the price Riyadh is likely to pay should it acquire military nuclear
coupled with Riyadh's
capabilities might outweigh the advantages of such a move. But strategic interest ,
could have the upper hand . Should it seem that the
kingdom's vital security interests are threatened, it may prefer to take a series of steps, including
obtaining a nonconventional arsenal, to reduce risks and ensure the continuity of the
House of Saud.
motivated by considerations of survival,
Saudi prolif causes nuclear war.
Edelman ’11 (Eric –Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments & Former U.S.
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67162/eric-s-edelmanandrew-f-krepinevich-jr-and-evan-braden-montgomer/the-dangers-of-a-nuclear-iran)
The Islamabad option raises a host of difficult issues, perhaps the most worrisome being how
India would respond. Would it target Pakistan’s weapons in Saudi Arabia with its own
conventional or nuclear weapons? How would this expanded nuclear competition influence stability during a crisis in either the Middle East or
South Asia? Regardless of India’s reaction, any decision by the Saudi government to seek out nuclear weapons, by
whatever means, would be highly destabilizing. It would increase the incentives of other nations
in the Middle East to pursue nuclear weapons of their own. And it could increase their ability to
do so by eroding the remaining barriers to nuclear proliferation: each additional state that
acquires nuclear weapons weakens the nonproliferation regime, even if its particular method of
acquisition only circumvents, rather than violates, the NPT. Were Saudi Arabia to acquire
nuclear weapons, the Middle East would count three nuclear-armed states, and perhaps more
before long. It is unclear how such an n-player competition would unfold because most analyses of nuclear deterrence are based
on the U.S.- Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. It seems likely, however, that the interaction among three or more
nuclear-armed powers would be more prone to miscalculation and escalation than a bipolar
competition. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union only needed to concern themselves with an attack from
the other. Multi-
polar systems are generally considered to be less stable than bipolar systems
because coalitions can shift quickly, upsetting the balance of power and creating incentives for
an attack. More important, emerging nuclear powers in the Middle East might not take the
costly steps necessary to preserve regional stability and avoid a nuclear exchange. For nuclear-armed
states, the bedrock of deterrence is the knowledge that each side has a secure second-strike capability, so that no state can launch an
attack with the expectation that it can wipe out its opponents’ forces and avoid a devastating retaliation. However, emerging
nuclear powers might not invest in expensive but survivable capabilities such as hardened
missile silos or submarine- based nuclear forces. Given this likely vulnerability, the close
proximity of states in the Middle East, and the very short flight times of ballistic missiles in the
region, any new nuclear powers might be compelled to “launch on warning” of an attack or even,
during a crisis, to use their nuclear forces preemptively. Their governments might also delegate launch authority to lower-level
commanders, heightening the possibility of miscalculation and escalation. Moreover, if early warning systems were not integrated
into robust command-and-control systems, the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch would increase further still. And
without sophisticated early warning systems, a nuclear attack might be unattributable or attributed
incorrectly. That is, assuming that the leadership of a targeted state survived a first strike, it might not be able to accurately
determine which nation was responsible. And this uncertainty, when combined with the pressure to respond
quickly, would create a significant risk that it would retaliate against the wrong party, potentially
triggering a regional nuclear war. Most existing nuclear powers have taken steps to protect their nuclear
weapons from unauthorized use: from closely screening key personnel to developing technical safety measures, such
as permissive action links, which require special codes before the weapons can be armed. Yet there is no guarantee
that emerging nuclear powers would be willing or able to implement these measures, creating a significant risk that
their governments might lose control over the weapons or nuclear material and that nonstate actors could gain access
to these items. Some states might seek to mitigate threats to their nuclear arsenals; for instance, they might hide their
weapons.
The plan’s appeasement.
Stern 6 (Martin, University of Maryland Graduate, Debunking detente, 11/27/06,
http://www.diamondbackonline.com/article_56223e79-7009-56a3-8afe-5d08bfff6e08.html)
Appeasement is defined as "granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace."
Giving Iran international legitimacy and removing sanctions would have maintained peace with
a potential enemy without changing the undemocratic practices of the enemy. If this isn't
appeasement, I don't know how better to define the word.
That’s not topical – economic engagement is the establishment of economic
contacts – not one time appeasement.
Resnick 01 – Dr. Evan Resnick, Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Yeshiva University, “Defining Engagement”, Journal of International Affairs, Spring, 54(2), Ebsco
DIFFERENTIATING BETWEEN ENGAGEMENT AND APPEASEMENT
In contrast to many prevailing conceptions of engagement, the one proposed in this essay allows
a substantive distinction to be drawn between engagement and appeasement . The
standard definition of appeasement--which derives from the language of classical European diplomacy, namely "a
policy of attempting to reduce tension between two states by the methodical removal of the principal
causes of conflict between them"(n29)--is venerable but nevertheless inadequate.(n30) It does not provide much
guidance to the contemporary policymaker or policy analyst, because it conceives of a foreign
policy approach in terms of the ends sought while never making clear the precise means
involved. The principal causes of conflict between two states can be removed in a number of
ways .(n31)
A more refined definition of appeasement that not only remains loyal to the traditional connotations but also
establishes a firm conceptual distinction from engagement might be: the attempt to
influence the political behavior of a target state by ceding territory and/or a geopolitical sphere of
influence to that state. Indeed, the two best-known cases of appeasement, Great Britain's appeasement of the United States
at the turn of the 20th century and of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, reveals that much of this appeasement adopted precisely these
guises. The key elements of the British appeasement of the US-acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine-permission for the US to build
and fortify a Central American canal, and acquiescence to American claims on the border between Alaska and the Yukon--consisted
of explicit acknowledgement of American territorial authority.(n32) Meanwhile, the appeasement of the Third Reich by Great
Britain was characterized by acquiescence to: Germany's military reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936); annexation of Austria
(1938); acquisition of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia as decided at the Munich Conference; and absorption of the remainder
of Czechoslovakia (1939).(n33) A more contemporary example of appeasement is the land for peace exchange that represents the
centerpiece of the on-again off-again diplomatic negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.
Thus, a rigid conceptual distinction can be drawn between engagement and appeasement.
Whereas both policies are positive sanctions--insofar as they add to the power and prestige of
the target state--engagement does so in a less direct and less militarized fashion than
appeasement. In addition, engagement differs from appeasement by establishing an
increasingly interdependent relationship between the sender and the target state. At any
juncture, the sender state can, in theory, abrogate such a relationship at some (ideally prohibitive)
cost to the target state.(n34) Appeasement, on the other hand, does not involve the
establishment of contacts or interdependence between the appeaser and the appeased. Territory and/or a
sphere of influence are merely transferred by one party to the other either unconditionally or in exchange
for certain concessions on the part of the target state.
Kerry’s focusing on Middle Eastern peace talks -- a shift in his focus causes IsraelPalestine war.
YL 11/7, YaLibnan, Lebanon News Service, 2013, “Kerry warns Israel of Palestinian uprising if peace talks fail,”
http://www.yalibnan.com/2013/11/07/kerry-warns-israel-of-palestinian-uprising-if-peace-talks-fail/)//DR. H
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
warned Israel on Thursday that it could face a third Palestinian
uprising and deepening international isolation if American-brokered peace negotiations failed.
Both Israel and the Palestinians have given grim assessments of the lack of progress in their talks, which the United States helped
revive last July after a three-year hiatus.
Kerry, speaking in Jordan a day after a visit to Israel, where he appealed for limits on its settlement building in the occupied West
Bank, reported
the negotiations had made “significant progress” in some areas.
He said it was important to keep aiming towards a full “final status” accord tackling issues at the
core of the decades-old conflict, in contrast with more modest interim deals plagued by diplomatic deadlock and years of
violence.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 television recorded in Jerusalem before he left for Amman, Kerry painted a bleak picture of
what might lie ahead if peace is not achieved.
“I mean, does Israel want a third Intifada?” he asked, referring to the danger of a new Palestinian uprising to follow those that
erupted in 1987 and 2000.
“If we do not find the way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel, there will
be an increasing campaign of delegitimization of Israel that has been taking place on an
international basis.”
Kerry was due to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Amman later on Thursday before returning to Jerusalem for more
talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday.
“Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas reaffirmed their commitment to these
negotiations despite the fact that at moments there are obviously tensions,” Kerry said.
Friction over the talks has risen in the last week because of Israeli plans, announced in tandem with its release of 26 Palestinian
prisoners, for some 3,500 new homes for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Palestinians have warned of a crisis if Israel continues to insist that they effectively agreed to turn a blind eye to the settlement
expansion, in exchange for the progressive release of 104 long-serving inmates.
After meeting Abbas on Wednesday in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Kerry said Palestinians had never condoned settlements,
which they and many countries view as illegal and the United States terms illegitimate.
Palestinians fear the enclaves, built on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and which they seek for a future state, will
deny them a viable country. Israel cites biblical and historical links to the territory.
Kerry, whose shuttle diplomacy helped to revive the talks, has set a nine-month schedule for an
agreement, despite widespread skepticism.
“I
remain absolutely committed to this ability to get a final status (agreement),” Kerry said at a news
warning of “prolonged, continued conflict”, violence and
confrontation if the talks failed.
conference in Amman, repeatedly
Plan shifts Kerry’s focus.
Anderson and Grewell 2k, (Terry L., Executive Director of the Property and Environment Research Center, J.
Bishop, former research associate for PERC. He is a graduate of Stanford University, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies, and Northwestern Law School, “The Greening of Foreign Policy”, PERC Policy Series: PS-20, December 2000,
http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps20.pdf)
Greater international environmental regulation can increase international tension. Foreign
policy is a bag of goods that
includes issues from free trade to arms trading to human rights. Each new issue in the bag
weighs it down, lessening the focus on other issues and even creating conflicts between issues.
Increased environmental regulations could cause countries to lessen their focus on international
threats of violence such as the sale of ballistic missiles or border conflicts between nations. As countries must watch
over more and more issues arising in the international policy arena, they will stretch the
resources necessary to deal with traditional international issues. As Schaefer (2000, 46) writes, “Because
diplomatic currency is finite . . . it is critically important that the United States focus its
diplomatic efforts on issues of paramount importance to the nation. Traditionally, these priorities have
been opposing hostile domination of key geographic regions, supporting our allies, securing vital resources,
Israel-Palestine war causes extinction -- risk of war is high.
Beres 11/11, Louis, 2013, “The Future of Israel's Nuclear Deterrence: Debates about Iran and Palestinian statehood will have
an effect on Israel's mode of self-defense,” http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/11/11/iran-israel-and-the-nuclearthreat-in-the-middle-east)//DR. H
A Palestinian state would make Israel's conventional capabilities more problematic; it could thereby heighten the chances of
a
regional nuclear war . Although Palestine itself would obviously be non-nuclear, its overall strategic impact could
nonetheless be magnified by continuously unfolding and more-or-less unpredictable developments in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Lebanon
and elsewhere in this roiling and chaotic area.
A nuclear war could arrive in Israel not only as a "bolt-from-the-blue" surprise missile attack,
but also as a result, intended or inadvertent, of escalation. If certain already extant enemy states were to
begin conventional or biological attacks upon Israel, Jerusalem might respond, sooner or later, with aptly
"proportionate" nuclear reprisals. Or, if these enemy states were to begin their aggressions with conventional attacks upon
Israel, Jerusalem's own conventional reprisals might be met, in the future, with enemy nuclear
counterstrikes.
For now, this would become possible only if a still-nuclearizing Iran were spared any final forms of Israeli or American preemptive
interference, actions appropriately identifiable in law as "anticipatory self-defense." As a preemptive attack against Iran now
seems operationally implausible, it is reasonable to assume that a persuasive Israeli conventional deterrent, at least to the extent
that it would prevent enemy conventional and/or biological attacks in the first place, could reduce Israel's escalatory exposure to
a nuclear war.
Pertinent questions arise. With its implicit ("deliberately ambiguous") nuclear capacities, why should Israel need a conventional
deterrent at all? After all, even after Palestinian statehood, wouldn’t all rational enemy states desist from launching any conventional
or biological attacks upon Israel out of an entirely sensible fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation?
Not necessarily. Aware that Israel would cross the nuclear threshold only in very extraordinary circumstances, these enemy states
could be convinced – rightly or wrongly – that as long as their attacks remained recognizably non-nuclear, Israel would always
respond in kind.
The only credible way for Israel to deter large-scale conventional attacks after the creation of Palestine would be by maintaining
visible and large-scale conventional capabilities. Of course, enemy states contemplating any first-strike attacks
using chemical or biological weapons are apt to take more seriously Israel's nuclear deterrent, whether newlydisclosed, or still "in the basement." A strong conventional capability is needed by Israel essentially to deter or to preempt
conventional attacks, attacks that could, if they were undertaken, lead quickly via escalation to various forms of
unconventional war.
However unforeseen, Palestine, already a "nonmember observer state" at the United Nations, would have measurably
corrosive effects on power and peace in the Middle East. As, by definition, the creation of this particular Arab state
would come at the territorial expense of Israel, the Jewish state's strategic depth would promptly and irretrievably diminish. Over
time, Israel's conventional capacity to ward off enemy attacks could be commensurately reduced.
If certain enemy states were to perceive Israel's own sense of expanding weakness and possible desperation, this could imply a
strengthening of Israel's nuclear deterrent. If, however, front-line enemy states did not perceive such an enhancement among
Israel's decision-makers, these states, animated by Israel's conventional force deterioration, could be encouraged to attack.
Paradoxically, for Israel, even the "successful" defeat of Arab/Islamic state enemies in an unconventional war could prove
intolerable. Here, after all, the results of a nuclear war, or perhaps even a chemical or biological war, could prove
calamitous for the "winner," as well as the "loser."
To be sure, a meaningful risk of regional nuclear war in the Middle East exists independently of any
Palestinian state. Still, this unprecedented risk would be further enlarged if a 23rd Arab state were to appear more-or-less
simultaneously with Iranian nuclear weapons. Above anything else, Israel must now do what is needed to prevent
such coinciding and mutually-reinforcing and existential perils.
Text: The United States federal government should normalize its trade relations
with Cuba if and only if the governments of a majority of Latin American nations
commit to:
--actively seeking a normalization process between the United States and Cuba,
and
--compelling the Cuban government to work towards establishing representative
democracy and better respect for human rights.
Counterplan solves the case—Latin American governments will say yes
Castañeda 9 - Jorge G. Castañeda, professor at New York University and fellow at the New America Foundation, was
Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, April 21, 2009, Wall Street Journal, "The Right Deal on Cuba," proquest)
The question of what to do about the embargo has once again cornered an American president. If President Barack Obama
lifts
the embargo unilaterally, he will send a message to the Castros and the rest of Latin America
that human rights and democracy are not his bailiwick. Furthermore, he lacks the votes in the
Senate to do so, unless he obtains an explicit Cuban quid pro quo, which Raul Castro cannot grant him,
especially with his brother back in charge.
Conversely, if Mr. Obama limits change to the recently announced freer flow of remittances and family visits to the island,
Democrats in the House, Latin American leaders, and the Castros will remain unsatisfied. And if he insists on political
change as a precondition for lifting the embargo, Mr. Obama would be pursuing the policy that
his last 10 predecessors have fruitlessly followed.
There might be a way to square the circle. It begins with a unilateral end to the embargo:
Nothing is expected from Cuba. But in exchange for eliminating the embargo, key Latin
American players would be expected to commit to actively seeking a normalization process
between Washington and Havana, and to forcing Cuba to establish representative democracy
and respect for human rights.
As democrats who experienced authoritarian rule and sought international support in their struggle against it, leaders like Brazilian
President Lula da Silva, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, and Mexican President Felipe Calderon have been incredibly cynical
and irresponsible about Cuba. Mr. Calderon and Ms. Bachelet have forsaken their commitment to democracy and human rights in
order to accommodate the left wing. Mr. da Silva, despite having been jailed by the military dictatorship in the early 1980s, has
pursued the traditional Brazilian policy of avoiding controversy. By nudging the Latin leaders toward a principled stance, Mr.
Obama would turn the tables.
This policy would give the Cubans what they say they want: an unconditional end to the
embargo, the beginning of a negotiation process, and perhaps even access to international financial
institutions' funds. The Latin American leaders would get a major concession from the new
administration on a highly symbolic issue. And human-rights defenders in Latin America and
elsewhere would see their concerns regarding free elections, freedom of the press, freedom of
association, and the liberation of political prisoners addressed as a demand from Cuba's friends
-- not as an imposition from Washington.
Mr. Obama
would look great, since U.S. policy would shift in exchange for Latin leaders'
dedication to principles like democracy and human rights that he and they espouse. A clear
commitment from Latin leaders to a normalization that would not follow the Vietnamese course
(economic reform with no political change) would be a major foreign policy victory for Mr.
Obama.
Unilaterally cooperating with Cuba destroys Latin American democracy.
Castañeda 8 - Jorge G. Castañeda, professor at New York University and fellow at the New
America Foundation, was Mexico~’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, September-October
2008, "Morning in Latin America," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 5, proquest)
Realpolitik and fear of another exodus of Cuban refugees across the Straits of Florida may tempt
Washington to pursue a "Chinese," or "Vietnamese," solution to the relationship with Cuba: that
is, normalizing diplomatic relations in exchange for economic reforms while leaving the
question of internal political change until much later. It should not do this, chiefly because of the
regional implications. Over the past few decades, the United States, Canada, the European
Union, and Latin America have patiently constructed a regional legal framework to defend and
encourage democratic rule as well as respect for human rights in the hemisphere. These values
have been enshrined in conventions, charters, and free trade-agreements, from the
InterAmerican Democratic Charter, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights to the American Convention on Human Rights and the
labor and environmental chapters of free-trade agreements, as well as in the democratic clauses
of the economic agreements between Chile and the EU and between Mexico and the EU. These
mechanisms are not perfect, and they have not truly been tested. But to waive them in the
interests of simply guaranteeing stability in Cuba and ensuring an exodus-free succession
instead of a democratic transition-that is, creating once again a "Cuban exception" for reasons of
pure pragmatism-would be unworthy of the enormous efforts every country in the hemisphere
has made to deepen and strengthen democracy in the Americas. Cuba must return to the
regional concert of powers, but accepting this concert s rules. To allow it to proceed otherwise
would weaken democracy and encourage authoritarian traditions in the hemisphere-and lay the
groundwork for other exceptions that would justify their existence by invoking the Cuban
precedent.
That causes a global collapse.
Fauriol and Weintraub 95 – *director of the CSIS Americas program and **Prof of Public
Affairs at the University of Texas Georges and Sidney, The Washington Quarterly, "U.S. Policy,
Brazil, and the Southern Cone", Lexis
The democracy theme also carries much force in the hemisphere today. The State
Department regularly parades the fact that all countries in the hemisphere, save one, now
have democratically elected governments. True enough, as long as the definition of
democracy is flexible, but these countries turned to democracy mostly of their own
volition. It is hard to determine if the United States is using the democracy theme as a club
in the hemisphere (hold elections or be excluded) or promoting it as a goal. If as a club, its
efficacy is limited to this hemisphere, as the 1994 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) meeting in Indonesia demonstrated in its call for free trade in that region, replete
with nondemocratic nations, by 2020. Following that meeting, Latin Americans are
somewhat cynical as to whether the United States really cares deeply about promoting
democracy if this conflicts with expanding exports. Yet this triad of objectives -- economic
liberalization and free trade, democratization, and sustainable development/ alleviation of
poverty -- is generally accepted in the hemisphere. The commitment to the latter two
varies by country, but all three are taken as valid. All three are also themes expounded
widely by the United States, but with more vigor in this hemisphere than anywhere else in
the developing world. Thus, failure to advance on all three in Latin America will
compromise progress elsewhere in the world .
Extinction.
Diamond 1995 - Hoover Institute Senior Fellow (Larry, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s,”
http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia
nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs
intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with
authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global
ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional
threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of
democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. The experience of this
century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion
do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize
themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their
own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not
sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on
or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring
trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment.
They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who
organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor
international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it
much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders,
they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the
only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can
be built.
The aff’s rejection of chaos constructs an unreal perfect world opposite reality that
they order themselves to – this engenders ressentiment. They blame the chaos that
is a part of them on their neighbor, and try to eradicate it.
Saurette ‘96, - Paul Saurette has a PhD in political theory at John Hopkins U, "I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them':
Nietzshce, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in INternational Relations Theory." Millenium Journal of International Studies.
Vol. 25 no. 1 page 3-6
The Will to Order and Politics-as-Making The Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order •. I mistrust all systematizers and
avoid them. A will to a system is a lack .of ! integrity."
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to the phenomenon of
human existence within a given cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to , meaning fundamentally
influences the social and political organisation of a particular community.5 Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of
the most basic philosophical foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic
and natural. Nietzsche suggests, .therefore, that to understand the development of our modem conception of
society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of
Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life
on heroic myths which honoured tragedy and k competition. Life was understood as a contest in
which both the joyful and ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life
were accepted and .affirmed as inescapable aspects of human existence.6 However, this •incarnation
of the will to power as tragedy weakened, and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the
self-respect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. -Everywhere the : instincts were in anarchy; everywhere
people were.but five steps from excess: the monstrum-in-animo was a universal danger’. No longer willing to accept the tragic
hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic myth, Greek
thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new social
foundation which would soften the tragedy of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates'
thought became paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the
idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old
Athens was coming to an end—And Socrates understood that the world had need of him —his expedient, his cure and his personal
art of self-preservation. Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard paralleled the widespread
yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate
foundation that promised mastery and control not through acceptance of the tragic life, but
through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, and the problematic. In response to the failing
power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce the very experience that had given rise to
tragedy by retreating/escaping into the Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In
Nietzsche's words, '[rationality was divined as a saviour...it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek
thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be
absurdly rational....'9 Thus, Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an intellectual framework. The Socratic Will to
Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and order life rationally by renouncing the
Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is
inescapably comprised of both order and disorder however, the promise of control through
Socratic reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World* of eternal and meaningful forms, in
opposition to an 'Apparent World of transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is
contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and^ ignored in relation to the
ideal order of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the
experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and the idealised order of the Real World. According to Nietzsche, this
dichotomised model led to the emergence of a uniquely 'modern'10 understanding of life which
could only view suffering as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook
created a modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be
understood only as a phenomenon for which someone, or something is to blame. Nietzsche
terms this philosophically-induced condition ressentiment. and argues that it signalled a potential crisis of the
Will to Truth by exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved historically
through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to Nietzsche,' ascetic Christianity
exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent World as the responsible
agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the
Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real World, As Nietzsche wrote, ‘I suffer: someone
must be to blame for it’ thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: ‘Quite so my sheep! Someone must
be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,-you alone are to blame for yourself '-This is
brazen and.false enough: but one thing, is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered." Faced, with the collapse of the
Socratic resolution and the prospect of meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or
be absurdly rational.... '12 The genius of the ascetic ideal was that it preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to
Truth by extrapolating ad absurdiuin the Socratic division through the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World!
Through this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a transcendental world of
philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired, always
blaming its contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action. This subtle
transformation of the relationship between the dichotomised worlds creates the .Will to Order as the defining characteristic of the
modern Will to Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World, the
ascetic ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of
deepest. sleep, in short absence of suffering According to the ascetic model, however, this escape is possible
only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order, then, is
the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the precepts of the
moral-Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order, therefore, generates two interrelated reactions.
First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World in accordance with
the dictates of the ideal Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this," however, the ascetic ideal
also asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World must be established
creating an ever-increasing Will-to Truth. This self-perpetuating movement creates an
interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and ordered in relation to
the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests, [t]he ascetic ideal has a goal—this goal is so universal that
all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men
inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions
solely from the point of view of its interpretation.''1 The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that theoretical investigation
must be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the perfection of the ideal. At the same time, this
understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent
World. With this critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes .the fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.
Our alternative is to “Do nothing in the instance of the plan.” The refusal to act
accepts the inevitability of struggle, allowing us to understand pain positively.
Nietzsche, ‘78 The anti-christ Human, All too Human. Aphorism #284 1878
The means to real peace.— No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest.
Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's
own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the
neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and
conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for
requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as
does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a
hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a
harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they
presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This
presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the
challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and
thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense
just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories
and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things,
will exclaim of its own free will, "We
break the sword," and will smash its entire military
establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had
been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must
always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all
cuntries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and,
half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear,
and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest
maxim for every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of
man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a "gradual decrease of the military burden." Rather, only when
this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be
destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.
Multilat fails and is unsustainable.
Young et al 13 Kevin Young is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst, David Held is Master of University College, and Professor of Politics and International Relations, at the University of
Durham. He is also Director of Polity Press and General Editor of Global Policy, Thomas Hale is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at
the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, Open Democracy, May 24, 2013, "Gridlock: the growing breakdown of
global cooperation", http://www.opendemocracy.net/thomas-hale-david-held-kevin-young/gridlock-growing-breakdown-of-globalcooperation
*We do not endorse the ableist language.
The Doha round of trade negotiations is
deadlocked , despite eight successful multilateral trade rounds
before it. Climate negotiators have met for two decades without finding a way to stem
global emissions. The UN is paralyzed in the face of growing insecurities across the world, the latest
dramatic example being Syria. Each of these phenomena could be treated as if it was independent, and an explanation sought
for the peculiarities of its causes. Yet, such a perspective would fail to show what they, along with numerous other instances of
breakdown in international negotiations, have in common.
Global coop eration is gridlocked across a range
of issue areas. The reasons for this are not the result of any single underlying causal
structure , but rather of several underlying dynamics that work together. Global cooperation
today is failing not simply because it is very difficult to solve many global problems – indeed it is –
but because previous phases of global cooperation have been incredibly successful, producing unintended
consequences that have overwhelmed the problem-solving capacities of the very institutions
that created them. It is hard to see how this situation can be unravelled, given failures of contemporary global leadership, the
weaknesses of NGOs in converting popular campaigns into institutional change and reform, and the domestic political landscapes of
the most powerful countries. A golden era of governed globalization In order to understand why gridlock has come about it is
important to understand how it was that the post-Second World War era facilitated, in many respects, a successful form of ‘governed
globalization’ that contributed to relative peace and prosperity across the world over several decades. This period was marked by
peace between the great powers, although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created
the conditions for what now can be regarded as an unprecedented period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onward.
Although it is by no means the sole cause, the UN is central to this story, helping to create conditions under which decolonization
and successive waves of democratization could take root, profoundly altering world politics. While the economic record of the
postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth and living standards rose rapidly across significant
parts of the world. By the late 1980s a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the
late 1990s countries such as China, India and Brazil had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this
day. Meanwhile, the institutionalization of international cooperation proceeded at an equally impressive pace. In 1909, 37
intergovernmental organizations existed; in 2011, the number of institutions and their various off-shoots had grown to 7608 (Union
of International Associations 2011). There was substantial growth in the number of international treaties in force, as well as the
number of international regimes, formal and informal. At the same time, new kinds of institutional arrangements have emerged
alongside formal intergovernmental bodies, including a variety of types of transnational governance arrangements such as networks
of government officials, public-private partnerships, as well as exclusively private/corporate bodies. Postwar institutions created the
conditions under which a multitude of actors could benefit from forming multinational companies, investing abroad, developing
global production chains, and engaging with a plethora of other social and economic processes associated with globalization. These
conditions, combined with the expansionary logic of capitalism and basic technological innovation, changed the nature of the world
economy, radically increasing dependence on people and countries from every corner of the world. This interdependence, in turn,
created demand for further institutionalization, which states seeking the benefits of cooperation provided, beginning the cycle anew.
This is not to say that international institutions were the only cause of the dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last
few decades. Changes in the nature of global capitalism, including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, are
obviously critical drivers of interdependence. However, all of these changes were allowed to thrive and develop because they took
place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. By preventing World War Three and another Great
Depression, the multilateral order arguably did just as much for interdependence as microprocessors or email (see Mueller 1990;
O’Neal and Russett 1997). Beyond the special privileges of the great powers Self-reinforcing interdependence has now
progressed to the point where it has altered our ability to engage in further global cooperation.
That is, economic and political shifts in large part attributable to the successes of the post-war
multilateral order are now amongst the factors grinding that system into gridlock. Because of the
remarkable success of global cooperation in the postwar order, human interconnectedness weighs much more heavily on politics
than it did in 1945. The need
for international cooperation has never been higher. Yet the “supply”
side of the equation, institutionalized multilateral cooperation, has stalled. In areas such as
nuclear proliferation, the explosion of small arms sales, terrorism, failed states, global economic
imbalances, financial market instability, global poverty and inequality, biodiversity losses, water deficits and
climate change, multilateral and transnational coop eration is now increasingly ineffective
or threadbare. Gridlock is not unique to one issue domain, but appears to be becoming a general feature of global governance:
cooperation seems to be increasingly difficult and deficient at precisely the time when it is needed
most. It is possible to identify four reasons for this blockage, four pathways to gridlock: rising
multipolarity, institutional inertia, harder problems, and institutional
fragmentation . Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of
causal mechanisms. Each of these are explained briefly below.
Growing multipolarity .
The absolute number of states has increased by 300 percent in the last 70 years, meaning
that the most basic transaction costs of global governance have grown. More importantly, the
number of states that “matter” on a given issue—that is, the states without whose cooperation a
global problem cannot be adequately addressed—has expanded by similar proportions. At
Bretton Woods in 1945, the rules of the world economy could essentially be written by the
United States with some consultation with the UK and other European allies. In the aftermath of
the 2008-2009 crisis, the G-20 has become the principal forum for global economic
management, not because the established powers desired to be more inclusive, but because they
could not solve the problem on their own. However, a consequence of this progress is now that
many more countries, represent ing a diverse range of interests, must agree in order
for global cooperation to occur.
Institutional inertia .
The postwar order succeeded, in part, because it incentivized great power involvement in key institutions. From the UN Security
Council, to the Bretton Woods institutions, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, key pillars of the global order explicitly grant special
privileges to the countries that were wealthy and powerful at the time of their creation. This hierarchy was necessary to secure the
participation of the most important countries in global governance. Today, the gain from this trade-off has shrunk while the costs
have grown. As power shifts from West to East, North to South, a broader range of participation is
needed on nearly all global issues if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the same time, following decolonization, the end of the
Cold War and economic development, the idea that some countries should hold more rights and privileges
than others is increasingly (and rightly) regarded as morally bankrupt. And yet, the architects of
the postwar order did not , in most cases, design institutions that would organically
adjust to fluctuations in national power .
Harder problems .
As independence has deepened, the
types and scope of problems around which countries must cooperate
has evolved. Problems are both now more extensive , implicating a broader range of countries and
individuals within countries, and intensive , penetrating deep into the domestic policy space and daily life. Consider the
example of trade. For much of the postwar era, trade negotiations focused on reducing tariff levels on manufactured products traded
between industrialized countries. Now, however, negotiating a trade agreement requires also discussing a host of social,
environmental, and cultural subjects - GMOs, intellectual property, health and environmental standards, biodiversity, labour
standards—about which countries often disagree sharply. In the area of environmental change a similar set of considerations
applies. To clean up industrial smog or address ozone depletion required fairly discrete actions from a small number of top polluters.
By contrast, the threat of climate change and the efforts to mitigate it involve nearly all countries of
the globe. Yet, the divergence of voice and interest within both the developed and
developing worlds, along with the sheer complexity of the incentives needed to achieve a low carbon
economy, have made a global deal , thus far, impossible (Falkner et al. 2011; Victor 2011).
Fragmentation .
The institution-builders of the 1940s began with, essentially, a blank slate. But efforts
to cooperate internationally
today occur in a dense institutional ecosystem shaped by path dependency. The exponential
rise in both multilateral and transnational organizations has creat ed a more complex multilevel
and multi-actor system of global governance. Within this dense web of institutions mandates can conflict,
interventions are frequently uncoordinated, and all too typically scarce resources are subject to
intense competition. In this context, the proliferation of institutions tends to lead to dysfunctional fragmentation, reducing
the ability of multilateral institutions to provide public goods. When funding and political will are scarce, countries need focal points
to guide policy (Keohane and Martin 1995), which can help define the nature and form of cooperation. Yet, when international
regimes overlap, these positive effects are weakened.
Fragmented institutions , in turn, disaggregate
resources and political will, while increasing transaction costs. In stressing four pathways to
gridlock we emphasize the manner in which contemporary global governance problems build up on each other, although different
pathways can carry more significance in some domains than in others. The
challenges now faced by the
multilateral order are substantially different from those faced
by the 1945 victors
in the
postwar settlement . They are second-order cooperation problems arising from previous phases of success in global
coordination. Together, they now block and inhibit problem solving and reform at the global level.
Plan kills Latin American relations.
Suchlicki 2k. (Jaime, University of Miami, s Emilio Bacardi Moreau Professor of History ¶ and International Studies and the
Director of the Institute for Cuban ¶ and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. June “The U.S. Embargo of Cuba”
http://www6.miami.edu/iccas/USEmbargo.pdf)
Cuba is not an important issue in U.S.-Latin American relations . The U.S.-Latin
American agenda includes as priority items trade, investment, and transfer of technology,
migration, drugs, environment, and intellectual property rights. Cuba is not a priority item
on this agenda . While publicly many Latin American countries oppose the embargo, privately
they are extremely concerned that Cuba will divert investments from their countries to the
island, and particularly that tourism will flock to Cuba, to the detriment of the Caribbean
economies.
Unilateralism is sustainable.
Kagan, 12 [Robert, 1-5, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe -- Brookings, “New Year, Old
Foreign Policy Problems,” http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2012/0105_international_relations_kagan]
Meanwhile, the
much-discussed “rise of the rest” has been overhyped. U.S. business leaders, and their pals in
markets do not equate to
emerging great powers. Russia is no longer “rising.” Brazil’s role in the world is underwhelming.
Turkey’s impact has yet to be demonstrated. India has not decided what it wants to be. Even
China, though unquestionably a major player, has not yet taken on a great power’s role. For the United States,
the punditocracy, have been mesmerized by these emerging markets. But emerging
Europe remains the key ally in shoring up the norms and principles of a liberal world order. Should Europe fall, the blow to U.S.
interests would be staggering. America matters: Reports
of U.S. decline are extraordinarily premature. The
country remains the central player in all regions of the world. Washington may not
be able to have its way on all issues or provide solutions for all the world’s problems. But , then, it
never could. Many today have nostalgia for an era of U.S. predominance that never existed. But in the coming months,
whether the issue is Iran, Syria or Asian security, regional players will continue to look to the
United States. No other nation or group of nations comes close to enjoying America’s global web
of alliances. None wields more political influence in international forums. And unless and until the
United States renders itself weak by unnecessary defense budget cuts, there will be no substitute for it as a
provider of security and defender of an open political and economic order.
Perhaps
2012 will be the year Americans gain a renewed understanding of that enduring reality.
Single issues aren’t key to cred.
Lake, 10– Professor of Social Sciences, distinguished professor of political science at UC San Diego (David A., “Making America
Safe for the World: Multilateralism and the Rehabilitation of US authority”,
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~dlake/documents/LakeMakingAmericaSafe.pdf)//DR. H
President Obama
and his administration appear to recognize the need to bolster the authority and
legitimacy of the United States in the world. But virtue alone cannot provide credible guarantees against future US
opportunism. Unipolarity is an enabling condition that persists. The problem of credibility is structural,
and not one that a new administration can solve simply by a new style or
approach to foreign policy. Ironically, to safeguard its authority requires that the United
States embed its coercive capabilities even deeper into multilateral institutions that can provide
real checks on potential opportunism.
Can’t solve Cuban sugar ethanol.
Sanchez ‘11
Adriana E. Sanchez, NotiEn, News Agency, 2011, “Biofuels Fighting for Space in Central America and Cuba,”
http://repository.unm.edu/bitstream/handle/1928/12797/Biofuels%20Fighting%20for%20Space%20in%20Central%20America%2
0and%20Cuba.pdf?sequence=1
Similar to Central America, Cuba’s
potential to become a leader in biofuel production is subject to
speculation, and it will be strongly tied to the energy policy that the island adopts within the
next few years. The Association for the Study of Cuban Economy (ASCE) says sugarcane could seemingly provide the raw
material for biofuel production. But tight supplies might be a problem. The island nation is expected to
produce only 1.2 million tons of raw sugar. This is a very small amount when compared to sugar
production in the 1990s, which was estimated to reach 7 million to 8 million tons per year. With its current sugarcane
output, Cuba could produce an estimated 3.2 billion gallons of ethanol per year, energy industry sources say. ¶ In an interview with
NotiEn, Jorge Piñón, a well-known expert on Cuban energy policy, suggested that Cuba would have to stop its dependence on fossil
fuels from foreign countries if it is to develop energy independence. "Cuba passed from papa Russia to papa Venezuela to solve its
population’s energy demand," said Piñón. "Cuba must strive to start working on an energy policy that can help the country
independent of who is in power." ¶ Piñón said ethanol production has not been more actively promoted
because of the complicated relation that Cuba has had with sugarcane. "Fidel Castro puts his foot
down every time there are talks about an increase in ethanol production; for him it is a political
issue," said Piñón, a visiting research fellow at the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University’s Latin American
and Caribbean Center and an analyst for the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami.
No warming impacts.
Burnett, 12 – Sterling, Ph.D., Senior Fellow in Environment and Energy at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA),
“Fraud and Heartland: A Scandal for Climate Alarmists, not Skeptics,” 2-22, http://environmentblog.ncpa.org/fraud-and-heartlanda-scandal-for-climate-alarmists-not-skeptics/.
Sadly (for him), Peter Gleick, the researcher at issue, could have obtained a good deal of the information he sought through a request
for Heartland’s 990, a tax document that non-profits have to provide to any who request it. Rather than going through legitimate
channels to obtain what information he could or, better still, questioning the veracity of the initial document he received — and there
were many reasons to question that document, among them the fact that it was delivered to him anonymously — using someone
else’s name, a Heartland board member — he requested internal documents. Despite all the sound and fury
surrounding this episode over the last week, really, nothing new was learned in the memos. As
Time Magazine summed it up: “The alleged memos seem to confirm that the Heartland Institute is trying to push it’s highly skeptical
view of climate science into the public sphere, which is only surprising if you’ve paid exactly zero attention to the climate debate over
the past decade.” Gleick admits that his actions were wrong and apologized but said he did it out of
“frustration.” One has to ask, frustration over what? Is he perhaps frustrated with the fact that he and his
fellow climate alarmists have, as of yet, been unable to convince Americans that the scientific
case for climate action is settled and stampede them into calling for policies that forcibly restrict
energy use? Daily polls show more American’s are coming to doubt the argument that human actions are causing a warming
that would result in catastrophic climate change. Or perhaps he is frustrated with the fact that an increasing
number of scientists – scientists with as good or better credentials and reputations as
those who argue that humans are causing warming — continue to highlight the weakness,
discrepancies and contradictions that continue to plague global warming theory and
demonstrate that the case in far from closed. Perhaps Glieck and his ilk are frustrated because
they constantly bray that scientists and think tanks that show skepticism concerning one or
another critical point of global warming theory are exceedingly well-funded; when the reality is,
and Gleick knows it, these scientists and think tanks are very modestly funded when
compared to the billions that are spent to on climate research, politics and on politically favored
technologies by governments, billionaires and corporations who will benefit from climate
policies, and the non-profit foundations and think tanks that want to use fear of global warming
to reshape the Western economic system into what they believe would be a more humane, equitable (socialist), global
version of society. A society where international bodies, with bureaucracies staffed by “experts” beyond the reach of crass democratic
politics and mass opinion will steer the ship of global-state in the direction of the “true” public good. Time magazine notes
that if anything, the Heartland memos debunk the idea of a well-funded “. . . vast right-wing
conspiracy,” behind global warming skepticism. Who says the Progressive era has passed?
Biodiversity doesn’t matter
Sagoff 97 – (Mark, Senior Research Scholar @ Institute for Philosophy and Public policy in School of Public Affairs @ U.
Maryland, William and Mary Law Review, “Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law Symposium Defining Takings: Private Property And The
Future Of Government Regulation: Muddle Or Muddle Through? Takings Jurisprudence Meets The Endangered Species Act”, 38
Wm and Mary L. Rev. 825, March, L/N)
Although one may agree with ecologists such as Ehrlich and Raven that the earth stands on the brink of an episode of
massive extinction, it may not follow from this grim fact that human beings will suffer as a result. On the
contrary, skeptics such as science writer Colin Tudge have challenged biologists to explain why we need
more than a tenth of the 10 to 100 million species that grace the earth. Noting that "cultivated
systems often out-produce wild systems by 100-fold or more," Tudge declared that "the
argument that humans need the variety of other species is, when you think about it, a theological one."
n343 Tudge observed that "the elimination of all but a tiny minority of our fellow creatures does not
affect the material well-being of humans one iota." n344 This skeptic challenged ecologists to list more than
10,000 species (other than unthreatened microbes) that are essential to ecosystem productivity or functioning. n345 "The
human species could survive just as well if 99.9% of our fellow creatures went extinct, provided
only that we retained the appropriate 0.1% that we need." n346 [*906] The monumental Global Biodiversity
Assessment ("the Assessment") identified two positions with respect to redundancy of species. "At one extreme is the idea that each
species is unique and important, such that its removal or loss will have demonstrable consequences to the functioning of the
community or ecosystem." n347 The authors of the Assessment, a panel of eminent ecologists, endorsed this position, saying it is
"unlikely that there is much, if any, ecological redundancy in communities over time scales of decades to centuries, the time period
over which environmental policy should operate." n348 These eminent ecologists rejected the opposing view, "the notion that
species overlap in function to a sufficient degree that removal or loss of a species will be compensated by others, with negligible
overall consequences to the community or ecosystem." n349 Other biologists believe, however, that species are so
fabulously redundant in the ecological functions they perform that the life-support systems and
processes of the planet and ecological processes in general will function perfectly well with fewer
of them, certainly fewer than the millions and millions we can expect to remain even if every
threatened organism becomes extinct. n350 Even the kind of sparse and miserable world depicted in
the movie Blade Runner could provide a "sustainable" context for the human economy as long as people
forgot their aesthetic and moral commitment to the glory and beauty of the natural world. n351 The Assessment makes this point.
"Although any ecosystem contains hundreds to thousands of species interacting among themselves and their physical environment,
the emerging consensus is that the system is driven by a small number of . . . biotic variables on whose interactions the balance of
species are, in a sense, carried along." n352 [*907] To make up your mind on the question of the functional redundancy of species,
consider an endangered species of bird, plant, or insect and ask how the ecosystem would fare in its absence. The fact that the
creature is endangered suggests an answer: it is already in limbo as far as ecosystem processes are concerned. What crucial
ecological services does the black-capped vireo, for example, serve? Are any of the species
threatened with extinction necessary to the provision of any ecosystem service on which humans
depend? If so, which ones are they? Ecosystems and the species that compose them have changed, dramatically,
continually, and totally in virtually every part of the United States. There is little ecological similarity, for example,
between New England today and the land where the Pilgrims died. n353 In view of the constant
reconfiguration of the biota, one may wonder why Americans have not suffered more as a result
of ecological catastrophes. The cast of species in nearly every environment changes constantly-local extinction is
commonplace in nature-but the crops still grow. Somehow, it seems, property values keep going up on Martha's Vineyard in spite of
the tragic disappearance of the heath hen. One might argue that the sheer number and variety of creatures
available to any ecosystem buffers that system against stress. Accordingly, we should be concerned if the
"library" of creatures ready, willing, and able to colonize ecosystems gets too small. (Advances in genetic engineering may well
permit us to write a large number of additions to that "library.") In the United States as in many other parts of
the
world, however, the number of species has been increasing dramatically, not decreasing, as a
result of human activity. This is because the hordes of exotic species coming into ecosystems in
the United States far exceed the number of species that are becoming extinct. Indeed, introductions
may outnumber extinctions by more than ten to one, so that the United States is becoming more and more species-rich all the time
largely as a result of human action. n354 [*908] Peter Vitousek and colleagues estimate that over 1000 non-native plants grow in
California alone; in Hawaii there are 861; in Florida, 1210. n355 In Florida more than 1000 non-native insects, 23 species of
mammals, and about 11 exotic birds have established themselves. n356 Anyone who waters a lawn or hoes a garden knows how
many weeds desire to grow there, how many birds and bugs visit the yard, and how many fungi, creepy-crawlies, and other odd life
forms show forth when it rains. All belong to nature, from wherever they might hail, but not many homeowners would claim that
there are too few of them. Now, not all exotic species provide ecosystem services; indeed, some may be disruptive or have no
instrumental value. n357 This also may be true, of course, of native species as well, especially because all exotics are native
somewhere. Certain exotic species, however, such as Kentucky blue grass, establish an area's sense of identity and place; others, such
as the green crabs showing up around Martha's Vineyard, are nuisances. n358 Consider an analogy [*909] with human migration.
Everyone knows that after a generation or two, immigrants to this country are hard to distinguish from everyone else. The vast
majority of Americans did not evolve here, as it were, from hominids; most of us "came over" at one time or another. This is true of
many of our fellow species as well, and they may fit in here just as well as we do. It is possible to distinguish exotic species from
native ones for a period of time, just as we can distinguish immigrants from native-born Americans, but as the centuries roll by,
species, like people, fit into the landscape or the society, changing and often enriching it. Shall we have a rule that a species had to
come over on the Mayflower, as so many did, to count as "truly" American? Plainly not. When, then, is the cutoff date? Insofar as we
are concerned with the absolute numbers of "rivets" holding ecosystems together, extinction seems not to pose a general problem
because a far greater number of kinds of mammals, insects, fish, plants, and other creatures thrive on land and in water in America
today than in prelapsarian times. n359 The Ecological Society of America has urged managers to maintain
biological diversity as a critical component in strengthening ecosystems against disturbance.
n360 Yet as Simon Levin observed, "much of the detail about species composition will be
irrelevant in terms of influences on ecosystem properties." n361 [*910] He added: "For net primary
productivity, as is likely to be the case for any system property, biodiversity matters only up to a point; above a
certain level, increasing biodiversity is likely to make little difference." n362 What about the use of
plants and animals in agriculture? There is no scarcity foreseeable. "Of an estimated 80,000
types of plants [we] know to be edible," a U.S. Department of the Interior document says, "only about 150 are
extensively cultivated." n363 About twenty species, not one of which is endangered, provide ninety percent of the food the
world takes from plants. n364 Any new food has to take "shelf space" or "market share" from one that is now produced.
Corporations also find it difficult to create demand for a new product; for example, people are not inclined to eat paw-paws, even
though they are delicious. It is hard enough to get people to eat their broccoli and lima beans. It is harder still to develop consumer
demand for new foods. This may be the reason the Kraft Corporation does not prospect in remote places for rare and unusual plants
and animals to add to the world's diet. Of the roughly 235,000 flowering plants and 325,000 nonflowering plants (including
mosses, lichens, and seaweeds) available, farmers ignore virtually all of them in favor of a very few that are profitable. n365 To be
sure, any of the more than 600,000 species of plants could have an application in agriculture, but would they be preferable to the
species that are now dominant? Has anyone found any consumer demand for any of these half-million or
more plants to replace rice or wheat in the human diet? There are reasons that farmers cultivate rice, wheat, and
corn rather than, say, Furbish's lousewort. There are many kinds of louseworts, so named because these weeds were thought to cause
lice in sheep. How many does agriculture really require? [*911] The species on which agriculture relies are domesticated, not
naturally occurring; they are developed by artificial not natural selection; they might not be able to survive in the wild. n366 This
argument is not intended to deny the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and moral reasons that command us to respect and protect the
natural world. These spiritual and ethical values should evoke action, of course, but we should also recognize that they are spiritual
and ethical values. We should recognize that ecosystems and all that dwell therein compel our moral respect, our aesthetic
appreciation, and our spiritual veneration; we should clearly seek to achieve the goals of the ESA. There is no reason to assume,
however, that these goals have anything to do with human well-being or welfare as economists understand that term. These are
ethical goals, in other words, not economic ones. Protecting the marsh may be the right thing to do for moral, cultural, and spiritual
reasons. We should do it-but someone will have to pay the costs. In the narrow sense of promoting human welfare, protecting
nature often represents a net "cost," not a net "benefit." It is largely for moral, not economic,
reasons-ethical, not prudential, reasons- that we care about all our fellow creatures. They are
valuable as objects of love not as objects of use. What is good for [*912] the marsh may be good in itself even if it is not, in the
economic sense, good for mankind. The most valuable things are quite useless.
Cuba is a flagrant, willful, and persistent violator of human rights — repression is
worsening.
Miami Herald 13 — Miami Herald, 2013 (“Human rights under abuse in Cuba,” Editorial, April 22nd, Available Online at
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/22/3358813/human-rights-under-abuse-in-cuba.html#storylink=cpy, Accessed 07-032013)
The State Department’s latest report on human-rights practices effectively puts the lie to the
idea that the piecemeal and illusory changes in Cuba under Gen. Raúl Castro represent a
genuine political opening toward greater freedom.
If anything, things are getting worse . The report, which covers 2012, says the independent Cuban
Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation counted 6,602 short-term detentions during
the year, compared with 4,123 in 2011. In March 2012, the same commission recorded a 30-year
record high of 1,158 short-term detentions in a single month just before the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.
Among the many abuses cited by the 2012 report are the prison sentences handed out to
members of the Unión Patriotica de Cuba, the estimated 3,000 citizens held under the charge of
“ potential dangerousness ,” state-orchestrated assaults against the Damas de Blanco
(Ladies in White), the
suspicious death of dissident Oswaldo Payá and so on.
As in any dictatorship, telling the truth is a crime : Independent journalist Calixto Ramón
Martínez Arias,
the first to report on the cholera outbreak in Cuba, was jailed in September for the
crime of desacato (insulting speech) and remained there until last week.
The regime is willing to undertake some meek economic reforms to keep people employed. It has even
dared to relax its travel requirements to allow more Cubans to leave the country if they can get a passport.
Both of these are short-term survival measures , designed as escape valves for growing
internal pressure. But when it comes to free speech , political activity and freedom of
association — the building blocks of a free society — the report is a depressing
chronicle of human-rights abuses and a valuable reminder that repression is the Castro
regime’s only response to those who demand a genuinely free Cuba. Fundamental reform? Not
a chance .
Moral duty to shun human rights abusers.
Beversluis 89 — Eric H. Beversluis, Professor of Philosophy and Economics at Aquinas College, holds an A.B. in Philosophy
and German from Calvin College, an M.A. in Philosophy from Northwestern University, an M.A. in Economics from Ohio State
University, and a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Education from Northwestern University, 1989 (“On Shunning Undesirable Regimes:
Ethics and Economic Sanctions,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 2, April, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions
via JSTOR, p. 17-19)
A fundamental task of morality is resolving conflicting interests. If we both want the same piece of land, ethics provides a basis for
resolving the conflict by identifying "mine" and "thine." If in anger I want to smash your [end page 17] face, ethics indicates that your
face's being unsmashed is a legitimate interest of yours which takes precedence over my own interest in expressing my rage. Thus
ethics identifies the rights of individuals when their interests conflict.
But how can a case for shunning be made on this view of morality? Whose interests (rights) does shunning protect? The shunner
may well have to sacrifice his interest, e.g., by foregoing a beneficial trade relationship, but whose rights are thereby protected? In
shunning there seem to be no "rights" that are protected. For shunning, as we have seen, does not assume that the resulting cost will
change the disapproved behavior. If economic sanctions against South Africa will not bring apartheid to an end, and thus will not
help the blacks get their rights, on what grounds might it be a duty to impose such sanctions?
We find the answer when we note that there is another "level" of moral duties. When Galtung speaks of "reinforcing …
morality," he has identified a duty that
goes beyond specific acts of respecting people's rights. The argument
is more involved in respecting the rights of others than not violating them by
one's actions. For if there is such a thing as a moral order, which unites people in a moral
community, then surely one has a duty (at least prima facie) not only to avoid violating the
goes like this: There
rights of others with one's actions but also to support that moral order .
Consider that the
It does so by
moral order itself contributes significantly to people's rights being respected.
encouraging and reinforcing moral behavior and by discouraging and
sanctioning immoral behavior. In this moral community people mutually reinforce each
other's moral behavior and thus raise the overall level of morality. Were this moral order to
disintegrate, were people to stop reinforcing each other's moral behavior, there would be much
more violation of people's rights . Thus to the extent that behavior affects the moral order, it indirectly affects
people's rights. And this is where shunning fits in.
Certain types of behavior constitute a direct attack on the moral order . When the
violation of human rights is flagrant , willful , and persistent , the offender is, as it were,
thumbing her nose at the moral order, publicly rejecting it as binding her behavior. Clearly such
behavior, if tolerated by society, will weaken and perhaps eventually undermine altogether
the moral order. Let us look briefly at those three conditions which turn immoral behavior into an attack on the moral order.
An immoral action is flagrant if it is "extremely or deliberately conspicuous; notorious, shocking." Etymologically the word means
"burning" or "blazing." The definition of shunning implies therefore that those offenses require shunning which are shameless or
indiscreet, which the person makes no effort to hide and no good-faith effort to excuse. Such actions "blaze forth" as an attack on the
moral order. But to merit shunning the action must also be willful and persistent. We do not consider the actions of the "backslider,"
the [end page 18] weak-willed, the one-time offender to be challenges to the moral order. It is the repeat offender, the unrepentant
sinner, the cold-blooded violator of morality whose behavior demands that others publicly reaffirm the moral order. When
someone flagrantly , willfully , and repeatedly violates the moral order, those who believe
in the moral order, the members of the moral community, must respond in a way that reaffirms the
legitimacy of that moral order . How does shunning do this?
First, by refusing publicly to have to do with such a person one announces support for the
moral order and backs up the announcement with action . This action reinforces
the commitment to the moral order both of the shunner and of the other members of the
community. (Secretary of State Shultz in effect made this argument in his call for international sanctions on Libya in the early
days of 1986.)
Further, shunning may have a moral effect on the shunned person, even if the direct impact
is not adequate to change the immoral behavior. If the shunned person thinks of herself as part
of the moral community, shunning may well make clear to her that she is, in fact, removing herself
from that community by the behavior in question. Thus shunning may achieve by moral
suasion what cannot be achieved by "force."
Finally, shunning may be a form of punishment, of moral sanction , whose appropriateness
depends not on whether it will change the person's behavior, but on whether he deserves the punishment for
violating the moral order. Punishment then can be viewed as a way of maintaining the moral
order , of "purifying the community" after it has been made "unclean," as ancient communities might have put it.
Yet not every immoral action requires that we shun. As noted above, we live in a fallen world. None of us is perfect. If the argument
implied that we may have nothing to do with anyone who is immoral, it would consist of a reductio of the very notion of shunning.
To isolate a person, to shun him, to give him the "silent treatment," is a serious thing. Nothing strikes at a person's wellbeing as
person more directly than such ostracism. Furthermore, not every immoral act is an attack on the moral order. Actions which are
repented and actions which are done out of weakness of will clearly violate but do not attack the moral order. Thus because of the
serious nature of shunning, it is defined as a response not just to any violation of the moral order, but to attacks on the moral order
itself through flagrant, willful, and persistent wrongdoing.
We can also now see why failure to shun can under certain circumstances suggest complicity. But it is not that we have a
duty to shun because failure to do so suggests complicity. Rather, because we have an obligation
to shun in certain circumstances, when we fail to do so others may interpret our failure as
tacit complicity in the willful , persistent , and flagrant immorality .
No food wars, and they don’t escalate.
Salehyan 08 (Idean, Prof. Pol. Sci. @ North Texas, Journal of Peace Research, “From Climate Change to Conflict? No
Consensus Yet”, 45:3, Sage, DOI: 10.1177/0022343308088812)
A few caveats are in order here. It is important to note, again, that the most severe effects of climate change are likely to be felt in the
future, and the future is inherently uncertain.4 While fundamental shifts in the environment are not inconceivable, our best bet for
predicting what is to come is to look at what has transpired in the past. Since it is frequently argued that climate change will lead to
resource scarcities and exacerbate inequality, it is possible to draw upon past evidence regarding these factors to develop a sense of
how conflicts might unfold given changes in the Earth’s atmosphere. Additionally, I do not take issue with the claim that climate
change will present considerable challenges for human societies and ecosystems more generally. Humanitarian crises stemming, in
part, from climate change have the potential to be severe, and steps must be taken quickly to attenuate such contingencies. Rather,
my purpose here is to underscore the point that environmental processes, by themselves, cannot explain why,
where, and when fighting will occur; rather, the interaction between environmental and political systems is critical for
understanding organized armed violence. First,
the deterministic view has poor predictive power as to where
and when conflicts will break out. For every potential example of an environmental catastrophe or resource shortfall
that leads to violence, there are many more counter-examples in which conflict never occurs. But popular accounts typically do not
look at the dogs that do not bark. Darfur is frequently cited as a case where desertification led to food
scarcity, water scarcity, and famine, in turn leading to civil war and ethnic cleansing.5 Yet, food scarcity and
hunger are problems endemic to many countries – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa – but
similar problems elsewhere have not led to large-scale violence. According to the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations, food shortages and malnutrition affect more than a third of the
population in Malawi, Zambia, the Comoros, North Korea, and Tanzania,6 although none of
these countries have experienced fullblown civil war
Block
Accidents result in extinction.
Toon ‘7 (Owen B, chair – Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences – Colorado University,
climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf)
To an increasing extent, people are congregating in the world’s great urban centers, creating megacities with
populations exceeding 10 million individuals. At the same time, advanced technology has designed nuclear explosives of such small
size they can be easily transported in a car, small plane or boat to the heart of a city. We demonstrate here that a single
detonation in the 15 kiloton range can produce urban fatalities approaching one million in some
cases, and casualties exceeding one million. Thousands of small weapons still exist in the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, and there
are at least six other countries with substantial nuclear weapons inventories. In all, thirty-three countries control
sufficient amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium to assemble nuclear explosives. A
conflict between any of these countries involving 50-100 weapons with yields of 15 kt has the potential to create
fatalities rivaling those of the Second World War. Moreover, even a single surface nuclear explosion, or an air burst in
rainy conditions, in a city center is likely to cause the entire metropolitan area to be abandoned at least for decades owing to
infrastructure damage and radioactive contamination. As the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in Louisiana suggests, the economic
consequences of even a localized nuclear catastrophe would most likely have severe national and international economic
consequences. Striking effects result even from relatively small nuclear attacks because low yield
detonations are most effective against city centers where business and social activity as well as population are
concentrated. Rogue nations and terrorists would be most likely to strike there. Accordingly, an organized
attack on the U.S. by a small nuclear state, or terrorists supported by such a state, could generate casualties
comparable to those once predicted for a full-scale nuclear “counterforce” exchange in a superpower
conflict. Remarkably, the estimated quantities of smoke generated by attacks totaling about one megaton of
nuclear explosives could lead to significant global climate perturbations (Robock et al., 2007). While we did not extend
our casualty and damage predictions to include potential medical, social or economic impacts following the initial explosions, such
analyses have been performed in the past for large-scale nuclear war scenarios (Harwell and Hutchinson, 1985). Such a study should
be carried out as well for the present scenarios and physical outcomes.
Cuba has tons of oil potential.
Veiga and González 13, Roberto Veiga and Lenier González, 5/7/13, “Does Cuba Have a Future in Oil?”
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=92634&print=1)//DR. H
Every exploration program, especially in frontier zones, that is, in new areas that have never been explored, has
different stages. There is always a very important stage, geological studies, where investigators estimate the potential for the
existence of hydrocarbons.
That is the process we have conducted for the past 10 years in Cuba, which includes a study by the U.S. Geological
Survey. This study, done for the first time in 2004, estimates
that in Cuba’s geological north strip, off shore, from
are oil reserves.
The surveyors raise the possibility that from 4 billion to 6 billion barrels of crude are still to be found. These
geological studies are very environmental, but historically they are highly trusted by our industry. That
Pinar del Río Province to northern Matanzas province, there
doesn’t mean that they guarantee the amount of oil, but it’s the first step in that stage.
The chances of finding oil; challenges to the effort
Finding oil in Cuba would not be a major problem from a technical point of view. Today, there is a technology to bring offshore oil to
dry land, where it can be refined or carried in tankers to other markets.
Another issue is related with our model of consumption. If we found oil in Cuba, the mere news would lead us to think, “Goody, now
I can turn on all the lights, do all that, and now I don’t care.” Conversely, if we find oil, we must adhere to the concept of savings,
recycling, using public transportation.
Reaching maximum production would take from three to five years. Each field could have 5, 10, 15 or 20 wells that could reach an
adequate production. Neither I nor the people with whom I’ve talked believe that Cuba’s potential in deep waters will exceed
200,000 or 300,000 barrels per day.
Eventually, if we find what we hope for, within five to seven years, Cuba could produce 250,000 barrels per
day.
Oil independence deteriorates US-Saudi ties
Tanter ‘12
[RAYMOND TANTER, Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan; President of Iran Policy Committee Publishing; and former
member of the National Security Council staff in the Reagan-Bush Administration, “The Geopolitics of U.S. Energy Independence,”
International Economy, Summer 2012, http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_Su12_GeopoliticsEnergySymp.pdf]
At issue is whether energy independence will cause¶ a revision of U.S. national security policy. Because¶ energy
is only one
of the drivers, energy independence¶ is unlikely to have the major effect implied by the¶ Verleger thesis.
During the Cold War, American participation¶ in the Korean and Vietnam Wars did not have¶ energy as a driver; likewise, energy is
not at the core of U.S. long-term commitments to South Korea and Japan in the post-Cold War era. Shared values, prior
commitments, and strategic calculations are more important than energy regarding countries such as Israel. In my experience on the
National Security Council staff in the 1980s, there was little discussion of energy in relation to Israel. Ditto for Turkey. Control of
energy was more important than values and commitments for Washington to save Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion in the first Gulf War,
but not relevant to the takedown of Saddam Hussein a decade later, and irrelevant to the post-September 11 invasion of Afghanistan
to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban. With respect to Iran, energy was a factor in the cooperation of American and British intelligence
to overthrow the Mosaddeq government in 1953, but proliferation concerns trump energy a half century later. Concerning
Saudi¶ Arabia, energy is at the heart of the relationship. So rising¶ oil prices and production costs, declining
reserves, and¶ increasingly available alternative fuels as well as nonconventional¶ sources of
oil are bound to make Riyadh of¶ less consequence to Washington than it is
today. ¶ Saudi Arabia’s comparative advantage in oil production¶ and the world economy’s thirst for oil converged to¶ make the
the¶ odds that the Kingdom will survive the spreading Arab¶
revolts are not high, and the American commitment to the¶ royal family is mainly against
external, not internal,¶ threats. Hence, coming to the defense of the Kingdom is¶ likely to be
perceived in Washington as too costly when¶ the threat is from within.¶ With European countries becoming
Kingdom a strategic ally in the past. But
more dependent¶ on Russia for energy supplies, and Russia as well as Germany¶ becoming closer economic partners, the likelihood¶
of out-of-area involvement by NATO in such places as¶ Afghanistan is not high. And as the saying goes, “Out of¶ area or out of
business!” Verleger suggests that American¶ energy independence could make this era the “New American¶ Century” by creating an
economic environment¶ where the United States enjoys access to energy supplies¶ at much lower cost than other parts of the world
and giving¶ the U.S. economy an edge over other nations, particularly¶ northern Europe. In the context of enhanced¶ American
energy independence, the Obama Administration’s¶ pivot to Asia is likely to be of more import for¶ Europe than the Middle East.
Finally, U.S. energy independence¶ is likely to reinforce isolationist foreign policy¶ tendencies
already in force in the United States. A gamechanging¶ event like an Iranian nuclear weapon could wipe¶ out the tide
toward isolationism.
US-Saudi interaction is fully dependent on oil – the plan removes that link
Congregalli ‘13
[Matteo Congregalli, International Politics Journalist, “Without Oil. Without Allies: USA and the New American Dream of
Independent Energy,” Urban Times, 2/15/13, http://urbantimes.co/magazine/2013/02/usa-oil-saudi-arabia-independentdomestic-energy-supply/]
Examples of oil-diplomacy are known to be neither smooth nor easy. Take, for example, the harsh relations
between the US and Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya; or the invasion of Iraq, back in 2003, whose justification was not uniquely about
Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction – as UN reports confirmed; or the closure of the Hormuz strait, back in 2011. Iran
threatened to close the strait in retaliation to the massive burden of sanctions on the Islamic Republic. As an unlucky coincidence,
almost 17 billion barrels pass through the strait, every day. The blockade imposed by the Iranian military Navy made the oil prices
skyrocket in just few weeks.¶ Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the US was always based on mutual
convenience. After 9/11, both Washington and Riyadh were allies in War on Terror. US wanted
stability in the area. Later on, Saudi Arabia wanted to preserve their power in spite of the Arab Spring. US needed oil for a
convenient price. Saudi Arabia needed arms.¶ In 2008, the US Senate struggled to approve a resolution to help cut
soaring gasoline prices by providing the Saudi government with 900 cutting-edge military kits in return for increasing oil
production. The resolution aimed at securing the Gulf area and winning support for the growing sanctions on Iran. Despite
the
potential revenue – about $20 billion – the decision was stalling at the Senate as the Saudis
were not keen on downing the price of the crude oil from 75 cents to 50 cents per gallon.¶ “We
are saying to the Saudis that, if you don’t help us, why should we be helping you? ” said the democratic
Senator Chuck Schumer. “We are saying that we need real relief, and we need it quickly. You need our
arms, but we need you to cooperate and not strangle American consumers.” The resolution passed,
eventually.¶ According to statistics: throughout Bush’s terms, the arms dealing with Saudi doubled from $19 billion between 20012004 to $40 billion between 2005- 2008. In the last five years, under Obama’s administration, the deals reached $60 billion.¶ At the
end of December 2011, the US Department of State held a press briefing about a further arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The
agreement included 84 brand new F-15 combat aircrafts for an eight-figure sum: $30 billion. The
Assistant secretary Andrew Shapiro declared:¶ “This agreement serves to reinforce the strong and enduring relationship between the
United States and Saudi Arabia.Ӧ No matter how much discounted oil you can get. Providing cutting-edge arms is also a strategy to
ensure the stability of the region, crucial for American interests.¶ “There are geopolitical interests at stake, driving the arms deal.
Saudi Arabia works with the US as they have a common strategy and common agreement,” says Farhang Moradi, senior lecturer in
Globalisation and Development at University of Westminster, London.¶ Shipping F-15s to Riyadh is a first-line defence to empower
the biggest US ally in the region. But¶ “We have to keep in mind that buying arms in respect of selling oil could be the case. However,
buying advanced arms doesn’t put the Saudi in the position of defining the area from actors such as Iran.”¶ Security, first – The
positions of the American military bases in the Persian Gulf (Image Source: Google Maps).¶ An additional security belt of air and
ground bases extends all around Iran and the Persian Gulf. There are at least 21 bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, United Arab
Emirates, Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait. The question we should answer is whether the military infrastructures are about to be left
behind now that the burden of regional interests and energy need is shrinking.¶ “These bases are giving them the infrastructures to
check and balance. It costs them something but the cost is worth it in order to manage the gulf,” says Moradi.¶ The military presence
is a result of with oil production and the control of the political actors. The Gulf oil has always been a priority for the US. But in the
age of the war on terror and the growing threat of a nuclear Iran, abandoning the battlefield is not a strategy-wise option. In the
same regard, we should not expect the sanctions against Iran to diminish and that the US army will leave their bases anytime soon.¶
The real shift in the region could come in the long run.¶ “If US oil demands fall, it doesn’t mean
that foreign demand won’t continue. Emerging countries suck oik; China, India, Turkey. They need oil on their routes
to development” says Moradi.¶ According to many, in ten years time there will be a new producer-consumer relationship in the
region. It will not involve the US anymore. Russia, China, India will be bounded by new energy ties.¶ “The
demand for oil is going to be pretty good. Those producing oil are therefore going to export a lot. The balance of forces will change in
terms of energy and power. Those changes will have subsequent effects upon other countries that may
perceive themselves as competing powers against USA; China and Russia.Ӧ This likely shift of interest
will cause a scenario where China and India will discontinue being mere investors in the Middle East and Central Asia. In the near
future they could install bases and military infrastructures in the region, while the American ones will be gone. ¶ The de-
Americanisation of the Gulf is yet to come. But the first signs are already emerging. At the
beginning of February, the US secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta announced that just one
aircraft carrier will be deployed in the Gulf instead of two. The decision is motivated by defence budget cuts. Is
it a sign of the de-prioritisation of the control of the Gulf? Probably. In the meantime, the lowering security in the area, as well the
US’ soft way of dealing with the Arab Spring, is making the Gulf States nervous. Are diplomatic relations facing a
crisis? It is definitely a sign of an upcoming change.¶ The surge in US oil and natural gas production, which will
scatter the American diplomatic ties, is not without reason. America suddenly found out that underneath their land,
millions of barrels of sweet crude oil were reachable by merely changing the drilling technique. A well-known one is called ‘fracking’
which involves fracturing layers of rock and pumping water and sand in the well to get to the oil reserve. Tens of sites in the US were
considered worthless till fracking was introduced. Fracturing the rocks allow to reach deep and huge oil reserves, otherwise out-ofthe-way. That’s how the States are turning into a Saudi Arabia with burgers, baseball, and guns.
Domestic politics block a reorientation in the US’ strategy.
Grandin 10 – teaches history at New York University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Greg,
“Empire's Senescence: U.S. Policy in Latin America,” New Labor Forum, 19:1, Winter 2010, pg. 14-23)//SJF
It’s not going to happen. Efforts to implement any one of the above policy changes would be
blocked by powerful domestic interests . Take biofuels. The idea to liberalize the U.S.
agricultural market—and have the rhetoric of free trade somewhat match the reality—is
recommended by all mainstream think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, as an important
step to win back Brazil. Obama recognizes the importance of Brazil, having nominated George W. Bush’s outgoing assistant secretary of state
for Latin America, Thomas Shannon—respected in establishment circles as, according to the journal Foreign Policy, “the most talented and successful individual” to serve as
Yet Shannon’s confirmation had been threatened
by Senator Chuck Grassley, representing the agro-industry state of Iowa, who objected to the thennominee’s comment during his confirma- tion hearings that removing a fifty-four-cent per
gallon tariff on imported ethanol would be good for U.S. foreign policy. The White House
immediately declared that it had no plans to change tariff policy, and Grassley allowed the confirmation to proceed.5 The
White House’s quick buckling probably has to do with its fruitless attempt to win over Grassley for health care reform, a further indicator of how foreign policy
Washington’s envoy to Latin America “in at least two decades”—as its ambassador.
is held hostage by domestic politics . Similar obstacles stand in the way of other foreign
policy reforms. The Cuban lobby, along with the broader conservative Right, prevents a normalization of relations with Havana. Fear of the
National Rifle Association halts a renewal of the assault weapons ban. As to the “War on Drugs,”
the Democratic Party is deeply committed to “Plan Colombia,” the centerpiece of that war. It is,
after all, a legacy of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy, and much of the $6 billion spent to fight it thus
far goes directly into the coffers of corporate sponsors of the Democratic Party like Connecticut’s
United Technologies and other northeastern defense contractors (it was Bill Clinton who in 1997, acting on behalf of
Lockheed Martin, lifted a twenty-year ban on high-tech weapons sales to Latin America, kicking off an arms build-up, in which Colombia, Chile, and Brazil have taken the
lead).6
As to immigration reform—also recom- mended by influential establishment groups to improve U.S. standing in Latin America— Obama, in
said it would have to wait until next year.
Mexico,
He has a near-filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a large majority in the House, yet
he says there aren’t enough votes and “there is not, by any means, con- sensus across the table.”7 Obama could easily assemble a majority coalition on this issue—comprised of
business interests who want cheap labor, Hispanics, progressives, social justice Catholics, and members of the labor movement (who long ago signaled their support for
conditions that make Latin
America the best venue in which to modernize U.S. diplomacy—namely that there is no
immediate threat emerging from the region, no equivalent of North Korea or Iran on the verge
of acquiring a nuclear bomb, no insurgency bogging down U.S. troops as in Afghanistan, and no
conflict threatening access to vital resources (Washington’s main antagonist in the region, Venezuela, continues to sell most of its oil to the
U.S.)—also mean that there are no real incentives for Obama’s fledgling foreign policy coalition to
expend political capital on trying to improve policy there. Analysts of the American empire—from Charles A. Beard in the 1930s
immigration reform)—yet fear of a backlash fueled by a contracting economy has led him to back- burner the issue. The same
to William Appleman Williams in the 1960s and 1970s— have emphasized the U.S.’s unique ability to subsume competing economic, ideological, and sectional interests into a
confronted with a
sustained economic contraction, the fallout from a disastrous overleveraging of military power
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the emergence of a post-Cold War, post-neoliberal world with
multiple power centers—expansion has given way to involution. The U.S. political system
flexible and vital diplomacy in defense of a general “national interest,” which has led America to unprec- edented global power.8 Yet now—
seems to be literally devouring itself from within, paralyzing the ability of foreign
policymakers to adjust to a rapidly changing world. Unable to leverage its soft, smart power
even in its own hemisphere, Washington is ever more dependent on the military and corporate
mercenary forces that have transformed Colombia into a citadel of U.S. hard power in the
Andes.
Their Kupchan and Mount ev concludes it’s a domestic problem.
Kupchan and Mount 09, Charles: professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations, Adam: Doctoral candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, Spring 2009, “The Autonomy
Rule,” http://www.democracyjournal.org/pdf/12/Kupchan.pdf)//DR. H
American strategists recognize the inevitability of a more level global playing field, but they have
arrived at an illusory response: that the United States and its
democratic allies should dedicate the twilight hours of their primacy
to universalizing the Western order.
Many
According to G. John Ikenberry, a political scientist at Princeton University, “The United States’ global
position may be weakening, but the international system the United States leads can remain the dominant order of the twenty-first century.” The West should “sink the roots of this order as deeply as possible” to ensure that the
world continues to play by its rules even as its material preponderance wanes. Such confidence in the universality of the Western order is, however, based on wishful thinking about the likely trajectory of ascending powers,
which throughout history have sought to adjust the prevailing order in ways that favor their own interests. Presuming that rising states will readily take their seats at the West’s table is unrealistic and even dangerous, promising
to alienate emerging powers that will be pivotal to global stability in the years ahead. Instead, the West will have to make room for the competing visions of rising powers and prepare for an international system in which its
principles no longer serve as the primary anchor. Sinking the roots of the West, founding a “league of democracies,” and turning NATO into a global alliance of democratic states would be admirable visions in a politically
homogeneous world. But the Western model does not command widespread acceptance. If the next international system is to be characterized by norm-governed order rather than competitive anarchy, it will have to be based
on great-power consensus and toleration of political diversity rather than Western primacy and the single-minded pursuit of universal democracy. To that end, the United States should take the lead in fashioning a more
diverse and inclusive global order. Call it the “Autonomy Rule”: the terms of the next order should be negotiated among all states, be they democratic or not, that provide responsible governance and broadly promote the
autonomy and welfare of their citizens. The West will have to give as much as it gets in shaping the world that comes next. This approach does not constitute acquiescence to illiberalism, but rather a more progressive
understanding of America’s liberal tradition. Just as it does at home, the United States should welcome diversity abroad, accepting that liberal democracy must compete respectfully in the marketplace of ideas with other types
of regimes. Indeed, toleration of reasonably just alternative political systems will promote U.S. interests far more effectively t8han the hubris of neoconservatism or the narrow idealism of the current liberal consensus. Respect
for responsible governments, toleration of political and cultural diversity, balance between global governance and devolution to regional authorities, and a more modest brand of globalization—these are the principles around
which the next order is most likely to take shape.
Their Kupchan ev proves the plan isn’t necessary OR sufficient.
Kupchan 12, Charles, Professor of international relations at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, 4/7, “America’s Place in the New World,” The New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opinion/sunday/americas-place-in-the-new-world.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0)//DR. H
*US military dominance isn’t in jeopardy solving their war impacts and other countries are alt causes.
Still, they’re missing the point. The
most potent challenge to America’s dominance comes not from the
continuing redistribution of global power, but from a subtler change: the new forms of
governance and capitalism being forged by China and other rising nations.
The democratic, secular and free-market model that has become synonymous with the era of
Western primacy is being challenged by state capitalism in China, Russia and the Persian Gulf
sheikdoms. Political Islam is rising in step with democracy across the Middle East. And left-wing populism is taking hold from
India to Brazil. Rather than following the West’s path of development and obediently accepting their place in the liberal
international order, rising nations are fashioning their own versions of modernity and pushing
back
against the West’s ideological ambitions.
As this century unfolds, sustaining American power will be the easy part. The hard part will be adjusting to the
loss of America’s ideological dominance and fashioning consensus and compromise in an increasingly diverse and unwieldy world.
If American leaders remain blind to this new reality and continue to expect conformity to Western values, they will not only
misunderstand emerging powers, but also alienate the many countries tired of being herded toward Western standards of
governance.
This transition won’t be easy. Since the founding era, the American elite and the public have believed in
the universality of their model. The end of the cold war only deepened this conviction; after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, democratic capitalism seemed the only game in town. But the supposed “end of history” didn’t last.
Many developing nations have recently acquired the economic and political wherewithal to consolidate brands of modernity that
present durable alternatives.
The last 30 years of Chinese development, for example, look nothing like the path followed by Europe and North America. The
West’s ascent was led by its middle class, which overturned absolute monarchy, insisted on a separation of church and state and
unleashed the entrepreneurial and technological potential vital to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the authoritarian Chinese
state has won over its middle class, and with reason: its economy outperforms those of Western competitors, enriching its
bourgeoisie and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.
And in today’s fast and fluid global economy, the control afforded by state capitalism has its distinct advantages, which is precisely
why Russia, Vietnam and others are following China’s lead.
The Middle East is similarly set to confound American expectations. Participatory politics may be arriving in the region, but most of
the Muslim world recognizes no distinction between the realms of the sacred and the secular; mosque and state are inseparable,
ensuring that political Islam is returning as coercive regimes fall. A poll last year revealed that nearly two-thirds of Egyptians want
civil law to adhere strictly to the Koran, one of the main reasons Islamists recently prevailed in the country’s parliamentary elections.
And Egypt is the rule, not the exception. If nothing else, the Arab Spring has shown that democratization does not equal
Westernization, and that it is past time for Washington to rethink its longstanding alignment with the region’s secular parties.
True, rising powers like India and Brazil are stable, secular democracies that appear to be hewing closely to the Western model. But
these countries have democratized while their populations consist mainly of the urban and rural poor, not the middle class. As a
result, both nations have embraced a left-wing populism wary of free markets and of representative institutions that seem to deliver
benefits only to a privileged elite.
¶ Rising democracies are also following their own paths on foreign policy, foiling America’s effort to turn India into a strategic
partner. New Delhi is at odds with Washington on issues ranging from Afghanistan to climate change, and it is deepening
commercial ties with Iran just as America is tightening sanctions. Standing up to America still holds cachet in India and Brazil, one
reason New Delhi and Brasília line up with Washington less than 25 percent of the time at the United Nations.
¶ Washington has long presumed that the world’s democracies will as a matter of course ally themselves with the United States;
common values supposedly mean common interests. But if India and Brazil are any indication, even rising powers that are
stable democracies will chart their own courses, expediting the arrival of a world that no longer
plays by Western rules.
We need to continue promoting democracy.
Kupchan 12, Charles, Professor of international relations at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, 4/7, “America’s Place in the New World,” The New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opinion/sunday/americas-place-in-the-new-world.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0)//DR. H
To be sure, even as it adopts a more pluralistic approach, the United States should defend not just its
interests, but also its values. It should continue to promote democracy, stand resolute in the
defense of human rights and do what it can to stop indiscriminate violence of the sort unleashed by
¶
Syria’s government.
¶ But American leaders do their country no service when they trumpet a new American century or topple governments in the name
of spreading Western values. Doing so will drive away the very nations the United States needs on its side to confront dangerous
pariahs and manage a world in which power is broadly shared.
Standing by its own values while also recognizing that there are alternative forms of responsible
and responsive governance would ultimately elevate the nation’s moral authority, making it
more likely that other countries would be as respectful of America’s preferences as America
should be of theirs.
Their 1AC internal link concludes democracy promotion doesn’t hurt multilat.
Kupchan and Mount 09, Charles: professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, Adam: Doctoral candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, Spring 2009,
“The Autonomy Rule,” http://www.democracyjournal.org/pdf/12/Kupchan.pdf)//DR. H
America’s adherence to the Autonomy Rule by no means precludes the promotion of democracy
as an objective of U.S. statecraft. Americans have every reason to remain confident that liberal democracy represents the
best form of government, both morally and materially. Accordingly, the United States should continue to use political and
economic incentives to encourage democratization.
However, the spread of democracy should remain one component of a long-term vision, and not serve as a
central objective defining America’s approach to international governance. If Americans are right about
the merits of liberal democracy, it will spread of its own accord as a consequence of its superior attributes and performance. In the
meantime, observation of the Autonomy Rule, humility about the strengths and weaknesses of the Western way, and respect for
alternative systems of government offer the most promise of providing the favorable international conditions in which democracy
will be able to demonstrate its virtues.
Warming’s inevitable.
Mims 12 [cites Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University's climate change institute, 3/26/12,
Christopher Mims, “Climate scientists: It’s basically too late to stop warming,” http://grist.org/list/climate-scientists-its-basicallytoo-late-to-stop-warming/]
If you like cool weather and not having to club your neighbors as you battle for scarce resources, now’s the time to move to
Canada, because the story of the 21st century is almost written, reports Reuters. Global warming is close to being
irreversible, and in some cases that ship has already sailed. Scientists have been saying for a while that we
have until between 2015 and 2020 to start radically reducing our carbon emissions, and what do you know: That deadline’s
almost past! Crazy how these things sneak up on you while you’re squabbling about whether global warming is a religion. Also,
our science got better in the meantime, so now we know that no matter what we do, we can say adios to the planet’s ice caps.
For ice sheets — huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet — the tipping
point has probably already been passed , Steffen said. The West Antarctic ice sheet has
shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48
cubic miles) a year since the 1990s. Here’s what happens next: Natural climate feedbacks will take
over and, on top of our prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an
irreversible tipping point. By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s been since the time of
the dinosaurs, and everyone who lives in red states will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for. The
subtropics will expand northward, the bottom half of the U.S. will turn into an inhospitable desert, and everyone who lives there
will be drinking recycled pee and struggling to salvage something from an economy wrecked by the destruction of agriculture,
industry, and electrical power production. Water shortages, rapidly rising seas, superstorms swamping hundreds of billions of
dollars’ worth of infrastructure: It’s all a-coming, and anyone who is aware of the political realities
knows that the odds are slim that our government will move in time to do anything to avert
the biggest and most avoidable disaster short of all-out nuclear war. Even if our government
did act, we can’t control the emissions of the developing world. China is now the biggest
emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet and its inherently unstable autocratic political
system demands growth at all costs. That means coal. Meanwhile, engineers and petroleum
geologists are hoping to solve the energy crisis by harvesting and burning the nearly limitless
supplies of natural gas frozen in methane hydrates at the bottom of the ocean, a source of
atmospheric carbon previously considered so exotic that it didn’t even enter into existing
climate models. So, welcome to the 21st century. Hope you packed your survival instinct.
Adaptation checks.
Singer et al 11 Dr. S. Fred, Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at
the University of Virginia, President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and a Member of the International Academy of Astronautics; Robert M. Carter, Research Professor at
James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia), palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine
geologist and environmental scientist with more than thirty years professional experience; and Craig D. Idso, founder and chairman
of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, member of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences, and
Association of American Geographers, et al, 2011, “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report,” online:
http://www.nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/FrontMatter.pdf
*Adaptation checks – wealth increases and technological advances would mitigate the worst effects of climate change – Singer cites
decades long empirics and is comparative – IPCC reports use current adaptation data instead of predictive data.
*If war impact – warming doesn’t cause wars – empirics go neg – cooling empirically led to wars and their claims are correlation
not causation – warming has been coincided with peace, prosperity, and stability.
Decades-long empirical trends of climate-sensitive measures of human well-being, including the
percent of developing world population suffering from chronic hunger, poverty rates, and deaths due to extreme weather events,
reveal dramatic improvement during the twentieth century, notwithstanding the historic increase in
atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The magnitude of the impacts
of climate change on human well-being depends on
society's adaptability (adaptive capacity), which is determined by, among other things, the wealth and
human resources society can access in order to obtain, install, operate, and maintain technologies necessary to cope
with or take advantage of climate change impacts. The IPCC systematically underestimates
adaptive capacity by failing to take into account the greater wealth and technological
advances that will be present at the time for which impacts are to be estimated. Even
accepting the IPCC's and Stern Review's worst-case scenarios, and assuming a compounded annual growth rate of percapita GDP of only 0.7 percent, reveals that net GDP per capita in developing countries in 2100 would be
double the 2006 level of the U.S. and triple that level in 2200. Thus, even developing
countries' future ability to cope with climate change would be much better than that of
the U.S. today . The IPCC's embrace of biofuels as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was premature, as many
researchers have found "even the best biofuels have the potential to damage the poor, the climate, and biodiversity" (Delucchi,
2010). Biofuel production consumes nearly as much energy as it generates, competes with food crops and wildlife for land, and is
unlikely to ever meet more than a small fraction of the world's demand for fuels. The
might cause war
and social unrest is
notion that global warming
not only wrong, but even backwards
- that is,
global
cooling has led to wars and social unrest in the past, whereas global warming has coincided with
periods of
peace, prosperity, and
social
stability .
No limit to agricultural productivity, things will improve
Simon 96 Julian Simon, Former Professor of Business Administration at the University of Maryland and Former Senior Fellow
at the CATO Institute, “The Ultimate Resource 2”, 1996, p. 102-104
Nor is this any "ultimate" limit. Rather, these gains are just the result of research over the past few decades, and there
is no
reason to think that future research in the next century or the next seven billion years could not
greatly multiply productivity. It is likely that before the world gets to 500 billion people, or even to 10 billion, the
maximum output per acre will be increased much beyond what PhytoFarm achieves now. The discussion so far does not take
account of such existing technology as bovine growth hormone, which has no proven effect on humans yet greatly increases the yield
of milk products.' Nor does the above assessment reflect such innovations as genetically engineered
plants, which will surely produce huge commercial gains in the next century.10 For example, rapeseed
output can already be boosted 15 to 30 percent with genetic engineering." The possibilities already shown to be feasible are
astounding. For example, one might insert into a potato genes from a moth that affect the potato's coloring.12 Other genes might
make proteins in a potato with the full complement of amino acids that humans need—giving the benefits of meat and potatoes by
eating the potatoes alone. Please keep in mind that this technology has been developed after only a few decades
of work on the topic, and only a little more than a century after the first scientific knowledge of
genetics. Potential progress in the future—even within the next few decades and centuries—is
awesome. Doomsaying forecasts about population growth outstripping the food supply that take
no account of these possibilities surely are seriously inadequate.
No risk of nuclear terror.
Chapman 12 (Stephen, editorial writer for Chicago Tribune, “CHAPMAN: Nuclear terrorism unlikely,” May 22,
http://www.oaoa.com/articles/chapman-87719-nuclear-terrorism.html)
A layperson may figure it’s only a matter of time before the unimaginable comes to pass. Harvard’s Graham Allison, in his book
“Nuclear Terrorism,” concludes, “On the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable.” But remember: After Sept. 11, 2001,
we all thought more attacks were a certainty. Yet al-Qaida and its ideological kin have proved unable to
mount a second strike. Given their inability to do something simple — say, shoot up a shopping
mall or set off a truck bomb — it’s reasonable to ask whether they have a chance at something
much more ambitious. Far from being plausible, argued Ohio State University professor John Mueller in a presentation at
the University of Chicago, “the likelihood that a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb
seems to be vanishingly small.” The events required to make that happen comprise a multitude of
Herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia’s
inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing. Besides,
those devices are probably no longer a danger, since weapons that are not maintained quickly become what one
expert calls “radioactive scrap metal.” If terrorists were able to steal a Pakistani bomb, they would still
have to defeat the arming codes and other safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized use. As for Iran, no
nuclear state has ever given a bomb to an ally — for reasons even the Iranians can grasp. Stealing
some 100 pounds of bomb fuel would require help from rogue individuals inside some government who are prepared to jeopardize
their own lives. Then comes the task of building a bomb. It’s not something you can gin up with
spare parts and power tools in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a safe haven and
advanced equipment — plus people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die
for the cause. Assuming the jihadists vault over those Himalayas, they would have to deliver the weapon onto
American soil. Sure, drug smugglers bring in contraband all the time — but seeking their help would confront the plotters with
possible exposure or extortion. This, like every other step in the entire process, means expanding the
circle of people who know what’s going on, multiplying the chance someone will blab, back out
or screw up. That has heartening implications. If al-Qaida embarks on the project, it has only a minuscule chance of seeing it
bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, it probably won’t bother. None of this means we should stop trying to
minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers
good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen.
Failed transition collapses Cuba
Naím, 1 – editor of Foreign Policy (MOISÉS, “When Countries go Crazy”, MARCH 1, 2001,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2001/03/01/when_countries_go_crazy)//eek
Some countries can drive other countries crazy. When people have this effect on one another, it is because of imbalances in the
brain’s neurotransmitters. With countries, it often happens because of the disproportionate influence of special interests. Cuba, for
example, has long driven the United States crazy. Just think of the Bay of Pigs invasion or the outsourcing of Castro's assassination
to the Mafia. For more recent examples of irrational behavior, think of the Helms-Burton Law or Elián. The problem is that Cuba not
only drives the United States crazy but also seems to induce some acute form of learning disability among U.S. politicians. Cuba
makes them forget -- or unlearn -- everything the world has painfully discovered about the transition from communism. This
knowledge can be distilled into five simple maxims: Lesson one: Failure is more common than success in the
transition to a democratic market economy. Lesson two: The less internationally integrated, more
centralized, and more personalized a former communist regime was, the more traumatic and
unsuccessful its transition will be. Lesson three: Dismantling a communist state is far easier and faster
than building a functional replacement for it. Lesson four: The brutal, criminal ways of a powerful
Communist party with a tight grip on public institutions are usually supplanted by the brutal, criminal
ways of powerful private business conglomerates with a tight grip on public institutions. Lesson five:
Introducing a market economy without a strong and effective state capable of regulating it gives
resourceful entrepreneurs more incentive to emulate Al Capone than Bill Gates. It is therefore safe to assume
that if the Castro regime suddenly implodes, Cuba will end up looking more like Albania than the Bahamas. But that
is not the assumption on which U.S politicians base their efforts to hasten Castro's demise. Although a lot of money, political capital,
and thought have been expended trying to overthrow the Cuban government, ideas about what to do the morning after are scarce
and often unrealistic. They usually hinge on the expectation that in the post-Castro era democracy will emerge and Cuban-American
exiles will lead other investors in transforming Cuba into a capitalist hub. More likely is that instead
of a massive flow of
foreign investment into Cuba, the United States will get a massive inflow of refugees escaping the
chaos of a post-Castro regime. Frictions between Cuban-Cubans and Miami-Cubans will make
politics nasty and unstable. New investments and privatizations will be mired in the legal mess
produced by the 5,911 claims to property in Cuba (valued at more than $17 billion) that have been filed with the
United States Claims Commission by former property owners. (That amounts to nearly seven years' worth of Cuban exports.) The
Cuban public sector is inextricably intertwined with the Communist Party, so the demise of the party will paralyze the government,
at least for a while. And the cost of any resulting humanitarian crisis will mainly be borne by U.S.
taxpayers, who will likely pay much more than the $2 billion spent containing the influx of Haitian refugees in 1994. But can't the
World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund support Cuba's transition with money,
experts, and projects? Sure, except that the United States forbids them from spending even a dollar to prepare themselves and Cuba
for the coming transition. The result is that these institutions are not ready to help Cuba. Again, the United States forgets a useful
lesson from another continent: The day after Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands at the White House in 1993, the World
Bank -- which had been instructed to prepare for the event -- was immediately ready to lend and invest in projects under the control
of the Palestinian Authority, even though the authority was not and still is not a member of the bank. Allowing such an initiative in
Cuba's case would cost U.S. taxpayers nothing and would help plan for the challenges ahead. Also, training Cuban professionals to
run a modern market economy is bound to be a better investment for the United States than blocking academic exchanges with the
island. The rational, self-interested approach for the United States that also avoids much future human pain in Cuba is to
concentrate all efforts on ensuring as smooth a transition as possible. This view, of course, is not shared by all. U.S. Senator Jesse
Helms recently said that "the opponents of the Cuban embargo are about to run into a brick wall on the other end of Pennsylvania
Avenue. President Bush is a committed supporter of the embargo." The failure of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba to achieve its
stated objectives over the last 40 years is dismissed by Senator Helms and some Cuban-Americans who argue that the embargo has
never been vigorously implemented. Perhaps, as Senator Helms predicts, things are about to change and the aging Cuban dictator
will finally fall. If Cuba collapses and becomes a failed state 90 miles away from U.S. shores, the
epicenter of the Caribbean drug trade, the source of a massive flood of refugees to the United
States, a corruption haven, and a black hole for substantial sums of U.S. aid, President Bush will have
no one to blame but himself. Or, more precisely, the powerful interest groups that blinded him to the lessons of experience.
Many Latin American leaders are sealed off from Cuba’s human rights abuses –
they don’t want to condemn Castro
Wilkinson, 10 - managing director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, is a general expert on Latin America
(Daniel, The New York Review of Books, “Cuba — A Way Forward” 4/28, http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/04/28/cuba-wayforward)
Since promoting democratic rule is a central objective of Helms-Burton, any action taken toward that end can therefore be
considered a crime. In this way, just as criticism of the Castros is equated with abetting their enemies, promoting democracy
is equated with US-sponsored regime change.
*
*
*
But if the pretext for the crackdown was bogus, it nonetheless served a crucial function: to recast
the government's repression of its citizens as the story of a small nation defending itself against
a powerful aggressor. It was the same tactic that Fidel Castro had been employing to brilliant effect for decades. By casting
himself as a Latin American David besieged by a US Goliath, he usurped the role of victim from his prisoners. The sleight of hand
worked because, for many outside of Cuba, the indignation provoked by the US embargo left little room for the revulsion they would
otherwise feel for Fidel Castro's abuses.
Raúl Castro has adopted this same tactic, so that when outsiders hear of Cuba's political prisoners, many think first of what the US
has done to Cuba, not what Cuba has done to its own people. While the prisons, travel restrictions, and
information controls make it difficult for Cuban dissidents to get their stories out to the world,
the Castros' portrayal of Cuba as a victim makes audiences abroad less willing to hear these
stories. The effect is to seal Cuba's prisoners off from international sympathy and reinforce
their prolonged solitude.
Once a year, for nearly two decades, the UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US embargo. In 2009, the
resolution passed 187-3, with only Israel and Palau siding with the United States. While this condemnation is deserved, there is no
such UN vote to condemn Cuba's repressive policies, or comparable outrage about its victims.
This discrepancy is particularly pronounced in Latin America, where the long history of heavy-handed interventions and outright
coups has left an abiding aversion to US bullying. Even leaders whom one might expect to be sensitive to the prisoners' plight choose
to remain silent. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was himself imprisoned by a military dictatorship, and former
President Michelle Bachelet of Chile is the daughter of a political prisoner (and herself a torture victim). Yet in recent years, both
have made state visits to Cuba in which they embraced the Castros and refused to meet with relatives of political prisoners.
Meanwhile, an
increasing number of leaders have praised the Castro government as a standardbearer for the region. President Evo Morales of Bolivia says that Cuba "teaches the entire world how to live with dignity and
sovereignty, in its permanent fight against the North American empire." President Rafael Correa of Ecuador speaks of the "Latin
American pride" he feels when witnessing Cuba's ongoing revolution, which "secured the reestablishment of human rights for all
Cuban men and women." Perhaps the most fervent supporter is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose government has taken
over the role, once filled by the Soviet Union, of keeping the Cuban economy afloat by providing millions of barrels of subsidized
petroleum. Chávez calls Cuba's revolution "the mother" of all Latin American liberation movements, and Fidel Castro "the father of
the motherland."
The permutation is a different policy than the plan
Kahler, 6 - Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of
California, San Diego (M., “Strategic Uses of Economic Interdependence: Engagement Policies
on the Korean Peninsula and Across the Taiwan Strait” in Journal of Peace Research (2006),
43:5, p. 523-541, Sage Publications)
Scholars have usefully distinguished between two types of economic engagement: conditional
policies that require an explicit quid pro quo on the part of the target country and policies that
are unconditional.1 Conditional policies, sometimes labeled linkage or economic 'carrots', are
the inverse of economic sanctions. Instead of threatening a target country with economic loss
(sanction) in the absence of policy change, conditional engagement policies promise increased
economic benefits in return for desired policy change. Drezner (1999/2000) has proposed
several plausible predictions regarding the employment of conditional strategies and the
conditions of their success. He argues that the successful use of economic engagement is most
likely between democracies (because democracies are better able to make credible commitments
than non-democracies), within the context of international regimes (because regimes reduce the
transactions costs of market exchange), and, among adversaries, only after coercive threats are
first used.
The success of a conditional engagement strategy should also be contingent on a state's
influence over domestic firms. If those firms find market-based transactions with the target
state unappealing, a government pursuing a conditional strategy must convince them to deal
with the target when desired change occurs. On the other hand, if domestic firms have strong
economic incentives to conduct economic transactions with the target state, a successful
conditional strategy must prevent them from pursuing their economic exchange in the absence
of the desired change in a target states behavior. In this regard, democracies may have a harder
time pursuing a conditional strategy: in a democratic setting, firms are likely to be openly
critical of politicians who try to restrict their commercial activities and will support candidates
who do not place such demands on them. Our first hypothesis (HI), therefore, is that conditional
engagement strategies will be less likely to succeed if the initiating state is a democracy,
especially when underlying economic incentives to trade with or invest in the target state are
strong.2
Unconditional engagement strategies are more passive than conditional variants in that they
do not include a specific quid pro quo . Rather, countries deploy economic links with an
adversary in the hopes that economic interdependence itself will, over time, change the target's
foreign policy behavior and yield a reduced threat of military conflict. How increased economic
integration at the bilateral level might produce an improved bilateral political environment is
not obvious. While most empirical studies on the subject find that increased economic ties tend
to be associated with a reduced likelihood of military violence, no consensus explanation exists
(e.g. Russett & Oneal, 2001; Oneal & Russett, 1999; for less sanguine results, see Barbieri, 1996).
At a minimum, state leaders might seek to exploit two causal pathways by pursuing a policy of
unconditional engagement: economic interdependence can act as a constraint on the foreign
policy behavior of the target state, and economic interdependence can act as a transforming
agent that reshapes the goals of the target state.
“Should” means “must” and requires immediate legal effect
Summers 94 (Justice – Oklahoma Supreme Court, “Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of Durant”, 1994 OK
123, 11-8, http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=20287#marker3fn13)
¶4 The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should"13 in
the May 18 order connotes futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti.14 The answer
to this query is not to be divined from rules of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old
practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the
omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1)
makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the judge will or would do at a later
stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's
intent must be garnered from the four corners of the entire record.16
[CONTINUES – TO FOOTNOTE]
13 "Should" not only is used as a "present indicative" synonymous with ought but also is the past
tense of "shall" with various shades of meaning not always easy to analyze. See 57 C.J. Shall § 9,
Judgments § 121 (1932). O. JESPERSEN, GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE (1984); St. Louis & S.F.R. Co. v. Brown, 45 Okl. 143, 144 P. 1075, 1080-81 (1914).
For a more detailed explanation, see the Partridge quotation infra note 15. Certain contexts
mandate a construction of the term "should" as more than merely indicating
preference or desirability. Brown, supra at 1080-81 (jury instructions stating that jurors
"should" reduce the amount of damages in proportion to the amount of contributory negligence
of the plaintiff was held to imply an obligation and to be more than advisory); Carrigan v.
California Horse Racing Board, 60 Wash. App. 79, 802 P.2d 813 (1990) (one of the Rules of
Appellate Procedure requiring that a party "should devote a section of the brief to the request for
the fee or expenses" was interpreted to mean that a party is under an obligation to include the
requested segment); State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958) ("should" would mean
the same as "shall" or "must" when used in an instruction to the jury which tells the triers
they "should disregard false testimony"). 14 In praesenti means literally "at the present
time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal parlance the phrase
denotes that which in law is presently or immediately effective , as opposed to
something that will or would become effective in the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck
v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).
“Substantial” requires certainty
Words and Phrases 64 (40W&P 759)
The words" outward, open, actual, visible, substantial, and exclusive," in connection with a
change of possession, mean substantially the same thing. They mean not concealed; not
hidden; exposed to view; free from concealment, dissimulation, reserve, or disguise; in full
existence; denoting that which not merely can be, but is opposed to potential,
apparent, constructive, and imaginary; veritable; genuine; certain : absolute: real at
present time , as a matter of fact, not merely nominal; opposed to form; actually existing;
true; not including, admitting, or pertaining to any others; undivided; sole; opposed to inclusive.
Resolved means definite
Random House 6 (Unabridged Dictionary, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolve)
re·solve Audio Help /rɪ ˈ zɒ lv/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation~~[rizolv~~] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, -solved, -solv·ing, noun
–verb (used with object)
1. to come to a definite or earnest decision about; determine (to do something): I have resolved
that I shall live to the full.